Presentation description

Climate change continues to have negative socioeconomic and health impacts globally, with disproportionately worse effects on the daily lives of historically marginalized individuals. In Utah, extreme temperatures, poor air, water quality, & wildfires create disparities among community members living around the Great Salt Lake's West Side. These effects may worsen as climate change is known to have links to a combination of interacting complex stressors known as multiple stressors (Räsänen et al., 2016; Ryan et al., 2024). Despite these potential effects, a limited understanding exists of what multiple stressors Utah's West Side residents experience. Thus, the aim of the study is to conduct a literature review to investigate how climate change may interact with everyday stressors. Articles were selected based on their theoretical relevance to Utahns and categorized according to their key stressors. From the literature, four main climate-related stressors (heat, air pollution, drought, and wildfires) were chosen based on their relevance to Utahns, alongside six types of daily stressors (physical health, mental health, cognition, violence, financial strain, and sociocultural strain). From these themes, a framework was created that shows the complex ways these stressors connect and interact. The findings suggest that an increase in exposure to climate-related stressors is linked to adverse effects across multiple daily stressors. At the same time, there is an extremely limited research directly examining the complex interactions between multiple stressors, specifically for marginalized individuals living around the Great Salt Lake in Utah. In order to effectively manage the complex stressors at play, a community-integrated approach is needed to spread awareness and mitigate climate change challenges faced by West Side Utahns.