Community Calendar

Free and Open to the public

What do local candidates for office think about climate change? How will it affect your vote in November? To aid citizens in their democratic deliberations, Gonzaga’s Institute for Climate, Water, and the Environment is proud to host the Spokane Candidates Climate Change Forum on the first Wednesday each October.

The Climate Forum has been hosted annually since 2019 and is a non-partisan space where candidates for local office can share with local voters and citizens what they would or would not do or support if elected to office.

As climate hazards and extreme weather impacts intensify and public systems across the United States face growing strain, mutual aid—understood as grassroots, reciprocal networks of care and solidarity—can be understood as a critical yet under recognized form of climate resilience. While most academic and policy attention has situated mutual aid within the context of COVID-19, its significance extends across both sudden-onset disasters, such as heat waves, hurricanes, and winter storms, and ongoing structural crises, including housing and food insecurity. Across these contexts, mutual aid operates as flexible, trust-based infrastructure: networks that mobilize quickly, adapt to changing conditions, and sustain forms of care that formal institutions often struggle to provide. This talk highlights the role of mutual aid within a climate adaptation and resilience framing, in Seattle, Washington and Asheville, North Carolina and draws upon semi-structured interviews to examine possibilities and challenges to collaboration with formal health institutions and local governments. Attention to these dynamics highlights both the possibilities and tensions that emerge in relation to formal institutions, with implications for how climate adaptation, disaster response, and structural inequities are understood and addressed.

Join Andrew Trister, MD, PhD (Former Chief Medical and Scientific Officer, Verily Health), as he examines how artificial intelligence is reshaping modern clinical care. Uncover why precision medicine delivered less than promised over the past decade, examine the essential gaps only human clinicians can fill at this technological tipping point, and learn how to evaluate and incorporate next-generation tools to directly improve patient outcomes.

As climate change drives more extreme heat, drought, flooding, wildfires, and other disasters, frontline communities, especially those already living without running water or functioning plumbing, face the greatest risks. More than two million people in the United States currently live in the water access gap (i.e. without safe water or sanitation in their homes), and millions more are vulnerable to climate-driven water quality degradation, water supply disruptions, and disasters that can quickly wipe out their access to water and wastewater services. This presentation examines how communities, cities, and utilities are working to adapt and build climate-resilient water and sanitation services. It explores key questions: How can communities strengthen their built and natural infrastructure, improve water management and planning, and advance laws and policies that support long-term resilience? What types of funding, technology, and information are available—and accessible—to support these efforts? Drawing on findings from Achieving Equitable, Climate-Resilient Water and Sanitation for Frontline Communities by Pacific Institute, Center for Water Security and Cooperation, and DigDeep, the talk highlights major barriers that hinder equitable climate resilience in the United States, including historic underinvestment, affordability challenges, inadequate data, and gaps in capacity and governance. It also showcases real-world strategies from across the country that center community voices, address historical inequities, enhance climate readiness, and expand access to safe, reliable, climate-resilient water and sanitation.