San Francisco Bay Area climate resilience group helps local communities talk about extreme heat

How can participatory science help members of a community understand and communicate the importance of addressing extreme heat? An effort spearheaded by the Oakland, California-based Greenbelt Alliance is in the middle of responding to this question.

Greenbelt Alliance, a nonprofit working to build climate resilience in the Bay Area, recently completed the participatory science portion of two projects as part of a broader initiative to map extreme heat in Santa Rosa.

The initiative began in June 2025, after receiving funding from the state of California’s Office of Land Use and Climate Innovation.

Greenbelt Alliance had been identifying high-priority locations facing extreme heat so the group could support climate resilience efforts there, according to Sadie Wilson, senior director of planning and research for the group. 

However, as Greenbelt Alliance was developing its plans, the group found that the existing heat data that’s available “does not downscale well. There are a lot of gaps in the data when you just use the existing heat data at the state level. It doesn’t really capture what people are experiencing, so we wanted to make the data ourselves,” Wilson continued.

Given Greenbelt Alliance’s past work with nonprofit partners such as Latino Service Providers, which bridges the local community with other nonprofits and local agencies, Greenbelt Alliance “wanted to take this opportunity to really think differently about how we engage the public in this,” according to Wilson. That’s how the participatory science aspect came in.

“The reasoning behind having this citizen science component was, one, really thinking about addressing this data gap, but two, also involving people in the process so that people who are experiencing the heat can be part of the process and be brought more into the solutions,” Wilson said.

One participatory science project entailed working with 13 Santa Rosa youth for nine months on extreme heat advocacy. The youth in that project conducted their own heat monitoring, and they created inventories of heat infrastructure in the area. 

That project had “a lot of really cool hands-on opportunities for the youth to get out in the community and learn about extreme heat in a hands-on way,” said Mariah Padilla, Greenbelt Alliance resilience manager.

The other project was a month-long community heat monitoring event. In that project, Greenbelt conducted a variety of outreach methods, such as posting Spanish and English flyers in public spaces and sharing project information with the group’s existing network of partners, to find community members interested in the citizen science effort. Community members were then trained at an in-person event where they learned the importance of monitoring extreme heat. They also brainstormed what kind of solutions they would like to see. About 36 households participated, and each participant received some compensation.

“That was one exciting way that we’ve been able to bring the community on in this process,” Padilla said. “We’ve conducted a lot of interviews, focus groups, and presentations throughout the community to share about this heat action planning process and get community input on the heat action plan.”

In both projects, youth and community members took home temperature monitors that recorded the ambient temperature every two or three minutes.

“The idea is to be able to compare the recorded data with other recordings. Are there big differences between the heat you’re experiencing there at your home and what we, as researchers, would think is the heat you’re experiencing, and maybe that could lead to some conclusions about where there might be hot spots or where to look further,” Wilson said.

The youth project actually helped inform the community project because, through the youth project, Greenbelt Alliance learned that participants need materials such as carabiners and zip ties to help attach the monitors outside, and participants needed instructions on paper instead of just an online form, according to Padilla. Project coordinators also learned to remind participants not to place the monitor where it might distort the readings, such as in front of a dryer vent.

Currently, Greenbelt Alliance is in the process of getting the monitors back. Once all the monitors have been retrieved and the data collected, the next stage is data analysis, where experts with the nonprofit Second Nature will analyze the data and look for insights. 

Later this year, Greenbelt Alliance expects to release a needs assessment report that will incorporate data and findings from both projects and serve as a guiding document that informs the final heat plan. Greenbelt will present that final plan to the state in 2027.

The guiding document, which Wilson says will serve as Greenbelt’s needs assessment or visioning document, will represent “basically all the work that we’ve done over the past year… [to] understand how different populations are experiencing heat and what they would like to see in the future.” The document will show how the collected data serves as a foundation when prioritizing and shaping recommendations for policy changes at the local and county levels, as well as presenting potential investment opportunities, she said.

Learning to talk the science 

Through both projects, but especially the months-long youth project, participants gained the language and the concepts related to extreme heat, Padilla said. 

“We taught them about tree canopy and [what is the] urban heat island effect. A lot of that training component was to equip the youth to better understand why we’re doing this heat monitoring and to help them understand why we’re seeing differences in temperature in different parts of the community,” Padilla said. While the youth program participants had explicitly expressed an interest in the environment and climate change beforehand and the community program participants already knew that extreme heat is an issue, concepts like tree canopies were newer for both sets of participants, she said.

Padilla and Wilson also see the projects as potentially cultivating new job skills. For instance, one of the youth is now serving as a youth engagement expert at Greenbelt, where the person will “ensure that the youth voice is shaping the heat action plan and informing some of our engagement strategies,” Padilla said.

“People are really interested in workforce training and in using those skills gained from the projects,” Wilson said. “Something we would really like to see more of is not just the citizen science, but also those job training aspects of how it could morph into a true partnership.”

Ultimately, the ability to educate participants and give them the language to speak about and advocate on extreme heat and climate resilience are marks of success for Padilla and Wilson.

“We want the youth to come away with the knowledge and be able to share it with their communities and expand it outwards, and so really giving them the tools and the language to talk about extreme heat was like a critical part, I think, in the success of the program and then our heat monitoring process,” Padilla said.

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Joanna Marsh

Joanna Marsh is a freelance writer and journalist based in Washington, D.C. For The Civic Science Observer, she reports on new developments across the citizen science landscape, covering both new research and on-the-ground practice. Her work highlights how local communities are engaging with scientists to contribute to ongoing scientific research and lessons being learned by the involved stakeholders.