Frequently Asked Questions

  • The Climate Change and Health Research Coordinating Center (CAFÉ RCC) is a three-year cooperative agreement between the Boston University School of Public Health, the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and the National Institutes of Health. The CAFÉ RCC aims to Convene, Accelerate, Foster, and Expand the climate and health community of practice, both in the US and globally.

  • C - To Convene a climate change and health community of practice (CCH-COP) through partnership with the Alliance of Community Engagement (ACE-CCH), other projects funded under the NIH Climate Change and Health Initiative, and the NIH Steering Committee; and organize and host events geared toward capacity building in the larger CCH research community.

    A - To Accelerate CCH research within the community of practice (COP). Our team uses extensive experience in data management, curation, and sharing specifically in the context of CCH research to:

    • Identify CCH research data needs and define common data elements across the COP.

    • Develop and promote data science and software tools for processing, linking, and analyzing CCH data.

    • Facilitate sharing and reuse of CCH data.

    • Provide data management, dissemination guidance, and cloud computing infrastructure to those who need it most.

    F - To Foster collaborations across the CCH COP by:

    • Facilitating communication, engagement, and sharing of resources within the COP.

    • Stimulating co-production of new knowledge and ideas across the COP.

    • Promoting timely dissemination and translation of COP advances into policy and practice.

    E - To Expand the existing CCH COP by:

    • Attracting a diverse community of CCH scientists via inclusive education, training, and mentoring

    • Providing funding for pilot and time-sensitive projects

    • Fostering a multidisciplinary, global COP.

  • The Climate Change and Health Community of practice is anyone who is interested in climate and health, whether they are researchers or working for government agencies, non-governmental organizations, community-based organizations, industry, or foundations.

  • Anyone interested in climate and health can become a member of our COP by completing our intake form here. You can also connect with us through our various CAFÉ engagement channels that we will be releasing soon. Please check back with our website for updates.

  • Please see the NIH webpage on their Climate Change and Health Initiative here

    • Join our community of practice through our intake form, and participate in follow-up surveys related to different resources.

    • Sign up for the annual meeting - suggest a topic area of interest, lead a session, provide training materials, etc.

    • Contribute data to the Harvard Dataverse library to enable and accelerate peer research based on best practices and standards of practice (SOPs).

    • Provide mentorship for ESIs / investigators from low- and middle-income countries (LMICs).

    • Engage with social media networks and communities.

    • Data management resources to aid your own data analysis, including code and analysis examples, a data management template plan, as well as community-provided data sets

    • Free / low-cost climate and health educational resources (including available online courses, texts, and podcasts), with new content coming soon

    • Networking events for meeting and collaborating with experts in the field

    • Mentorship opportunities, and mentoring for pilot awardees

    • Opportunities to participate in / present your work at annual meetings

    • Working groups around critical climate and health topics of interest

    • Database of existing climate and health research projects and available funding resources

    • Additional policy-oriented and research translation resources

    • Pilot funding

  • Will provide:

    • A CAFÉ-CCH Collection of CCH data on Harvard Dataverse allowing researchers to contribute, deposit, share, and reuse data. Commonly used GitHubdatasets will be curated and deposited into the collection by the CAFÉ RCC team.

    • A CAFÉ-CCH Collection of CCH code, software, and tutorials on GitHub allowing researchers to contribute, share, and reuse existing code and software for data processing and analysis to facilitate reproducibility. The CAFÉ RCC team will share code/software/tutorials for commonly used data processing and analysis tasks such as spatial aggregations, data harmonization, and analysis.

    • Data management and dissemination guidelines for the community.

    • For pilot awardees and/or LMIC collaborators, additional services and guidance on utilizing cloud computing infrastructure will be provided.

    Will not provide:

    • Researcher-specific data curation or data analysis services.

  • We’re excited to launch our inaugural pilot funding in late fall of 2023. Please check back for more information and updates!

  • Please utilize the Contact Us button at the bottom of this page.

  • Please utilize the Contact Us button at the bottom of this page.

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