Health as the embodiment of climate inequity: Evidence from communities of color in Greater Boston

Climate change poses uneven health risks across racially and ethnically diverse communities. This qualitative study examined how Asian American, Black, Latinx, and Native American residents of Greater Boston understood climate-related health risks and how those experiences reflected broader structural inequities. We analyzed eight race- and community-stratified focus groups conducted in English, Spanish, and Cantonese. Guided by theories of embodiment and informed by relational and climate justice perspectives, we treated health as evidence of how climate change operates through unequal infrastructures and historically produced social relations. Participants consistently described climate change through health pathways including heat-related illness, respiratory disease, chronic stress, food insecurity, and disrupted access to healthcare. These pathways were shaped by housing quality, energy burden, transportation, neighborhood conditions, healthcare access, and preparedness. Participants also connected climate vulnerability to racialized disinvestment, colonial dispossession, resource extraction, migration, and unequal institutional protection. Although the mechanisms of harm were broadly shared, their meanings varied across communities in relation to place, governance, migration, displacement, and relationships to land. The findings show that climate change becomes embodied through cumulative, relational, and structurally patterned processes rather than isolated exposures or differences in awareness. Reducing climate-related health inequities requires interventions that address the historical, material, and institutional conditions shaping exposure, protection, care, and recovery.