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Campo-Sano Climate Action Conference
October 4 @ 9:00 am – 5:00 pm
Campo-Sano Climate Action: A Regional Conference on California Farmworkers and the Environment will be co-hosted on October 4th, 2025, by the University of California, Santa Cruz, and community partners
The conference will address the challenges of resilience amid the impacts of climate changes and the many other compounding risks farmworkers face. We will first review lessons learned from developing practical remedies and health promoter training designed to protect farming communities. Next, we will involve all attendees in deliberating ways to scale up these protective efforts and make them sustainable amid mounting social and political challenges.
Program Description
The daylong conference will start with a morning session including testimonies of health promoters from local community-based organizations (CBO’s) and UCSC students. The frontline community health workers will describe the challenges they face in trying to protect farmworkers from environmental stressors in a context that is also overshadowed by chronic but intensifying political and economic vulnerabilities.
A report will also be delivered by faculty on the two-year effort supported by funding from a Californian Climate Action grant to develop the Campo-Sano data app. This app is designed to inform local farm communities on climate related risks from exposures to high temperatures, flooding, wildfire air pollution, groundwater contamination and other risks. We will showcase how this application can be used on mobile phones to support farmworkers who want to report their experience of these risks anonymously to state agencies and legal advocacy groups.
A keynote luncheon presentation will be followed by a dialogue between representatives of state agencies and local community-based partners. Discussion panels and breakout sessions will engage these CBO’s and state agency officials to explore the extension of workplace protections for farmworkers and further regulation enforcement, as well as the possible scale-up of Campo-Sano trainings across the state. This dialogue is critical in the face of the federal government’s retreat from protecting agricultural workers, their employers and the food security they support for our wider community.
