News

Promotores trained on climate impacts teaching fellow farmworkers (March 2025)
Helsinki Symposium on “The Intellectual Origins of Geoeconomics” (Feb 2025)
Tools and training combat health impacts on farmworkers (Feb 2025)
‘Brutal’ trade-offs keep farmworkers laboring in dangerous heat (August 2024)
Should Big Pharma pay poor countries for finding new diseases? (February 2024)
Lessons from COVID reveal monopoly power in biopharma (February 2024)
Meet Focus Agriculture Class 33 (February 2024)
Five UC Santa Cruz projects win California Climate Action Grant funding (August 2023)
Student-supported global research on Big Pharma (August 2023)
Global health degree program launches at UCSC (May 2022)
Health equity cjallenges in the national and global vaccine rollout (Winter 2021)
Sciencing in Place with Dr. Matt Sparke, Professor of Politics, UCSC (August 2020)

Farmworker Community Health Vulnerabilities and Responses Amid Climate Change

With funding from the state of California for Climate Action, Matt's most recent work addresses "Farmworker Community Health Vulnerabilities and Responses Amid Climate Change." This is a large collaborative project involving the work of 10 community-based organizations and over 20 faculty colleagues from UCSC, UC Riverside, UC Berkeley and UCSF, as well as students from the Global and Community Health program at UCSC. Together we are working to address the ways in which the vectors of vulnerability tied to climate change (extreme heat, drought, floods, air pollution, water pollution and new pests and pesticide exposures) compound pre-existing social, economic and political vulnerabilities. We are creating a data-sharing dashboard about these intersecting vulnerabilities and also developing a set of response tools for promotores (community-health workers) that provide resources on the risks, rights and re-training opportunities available to farmworkers. For more on this project please visit our project website.