Temperature, shade, and adolescent psychopathology: understanding how place shapes health

Adapting to climate change requires countermeasures that can protect public mental health and community well-

being. Cities and states increasingly incorporate population health promotion into urban planning decisions, yet

the impacts of such decision decisions on mental health outcomes remain largely unstudied. With respect to

climate change cities have significant capacity to help offset the adverse effects of increasing temperatures and

enhance community resilience, through altering the design of natural and built environments. However, such

decisions require empiric evidence on the health effects of both increasing temperature and offsetting designs

to increase shade, particularly given the racial and socioeconomic inequalities in shade access. On a given day,

significant spatial variation in temperature can occur within a city or urban region, mostly driven by local

differences in shade. Temperature and shade exposure have been linked to psychopathology for centuries, with

ample biological plausibility, but few modern studies have provided comprehensive data. We propose to utilize

a cohort study of 3,396 high school students, with substantial diversity in race, income, and neighborhood,

recruited in 9th grade in 2013 in Los Angeles County, and followed up eight times with 3,000 longitudinally

followed adolescents and identify transdiagnostic psychopathological symptoms and trajectories; 2) determine

the impact of neighborhood surface temperature, shaded areas, and greenspace on internalizing and

externalizing dimensions, transdiagnostic traits; and 3) construct and compare neighborhood typologies of

psychopathological risk incorporating physical and social environmental data and novel latent variable

techniques. Our research team has extensive expertise in spatial and psychiatric epidemiology and experience

in translating science to policy. This work will provide critical missing data on the effects of green infrastructure

on psychopathology among adolescents. Such data are needed to support decision-making around urban

planning, investment, and climate change mitigation to improve population health for local communities.