Meet the ECO team: Daaniya Iyaz

Daaniya Iyaz serves as Climate Preparedness Project Manager for King County’s Executive Climate Office, where she partners with County staff, local jurisdictions, and community organizations to promote public health and safety during extreme heat. Growing up in King County, Iyaz says periods of extreme drought, heat, and flooding heightened her awareness of the impacts of climate change – and how some people face more severe impacts than others.

Daaniya would love to hear from other King County organizations and community members working on extreme heat! You can reach her at daiyaz@kingcounty.gov, and read her full interview – including her advice for getting involved with climate action –below:

What is your role as ECO’s “Climate Preparedness Project Manager”?
I work on implementing the “climate preparedness” section of King County Strategic Climate Action Plan, and I focus specifically on the Extreme Heat Mitigation Strategy we released in 2024. It’s a guidebook with 20 strategies detailing how King County government and our community partners can approach planning for and responding to extreme heat. It’s meant to cover both short-term plans like communications and long-term projects such as tree canopy building codes, and my role is focused on how we implement those measures – especially those that King County can commit to doing.

I also work with external partners on ways to collaborate and use the heat strategy as a framework to address the challenges they’re seeing in their communities, and I coordinate with the Puget Sound Climate Preparedness Collaborative, which is a collaborative of multiple local governments in the Puget Sound region that are focusing on different aspects of climate preparedness. There, I focus on how to support communities in achieving their climate preparedness goals.

What got you interested in climate work?
I’ve lived in King County pretty much all of my life, but I’m originally from the southern part of India, and I’d consider those both my hometowns. I started to notice the impacts of climate change over time; here in Washington state, I noticed more wildfire smoke and heat, and at my home in south India I noticed a lot of intense floods, along with prolonged drought and severe heat waves. I felt really attuned to the human impacts, and noticed not everybody is impacted the same; things like zip code and income determined how you experience the seasons.

Meanwhile, I went to college interested in the environment after a really good environmental science teacher. I initially was really interested in biofuels, so I went to the University of Washington as a Bioresource Science and Engineering major, and a lot of our research and work was focused on alternatives to fossil fuel products. In graduate school, I studied climate change and health, and learned I could lean into research or into community and climate justice work. That’s how I got into the climate adaptation space – the perfect blend of the science and the human end, where you’re working with community, learning from them and seeing how you can help them prepare for climate impacts already here right now.

Growing up here and being part of the community -- how does that tie into your work?
A lot of it is personal experience – I remember taking a picture of wildfire smoke, with a very orange sky; I really did not recall that kind of thing from my childhood. My sister has asthma, and my dad is sensitive to these kinds of things, so they were coughing... or during a power outage during extreme heat, we went to a business nearby, but the power was out there too – it just felt like a zombie survival movie!

But even with those personal experiences, I knew that there are other communities that are far more direly impacted – like during the Pacific Northwest heat dome, for example. There were over 30 deaths in King County itself – some because of indoor temperatures, some because of underlying health conditions or age, making some people more impacted.

What was your path to this position at King County?
I took every opportunity to learn something new. That included multiple internships – some that were in academic research, one with the group Front and Centered, an environmental justice coalition, and then I did one with Public Health of Seattle and King County, focused on evaluating community programming that was part of a COVID-19 and health equity grant.

I enjoyed talking with people and working on programs that are directly responsive to community needs, and learning about the intersection between environmental health, racial equity, and social justice. I wanted to stay at King County, and after my internship I took a part-time role focused on water sustainability, and then a role opened up working on King County’s Extreme Heat Mitigation Strategy – and that brought me into the Executive Climate Office.

What advice do you have for people who want to get into this field?
Cold e-mails; reach out to people who are working on research or projects you find interesting. Attend webinars, sign up for newsletters, stay attuned to what’s happening in the field. And when we talk about skills, sometimes we get wrapped up in what we’ve done in school or at work – but there’s also lived experience that you bring to the table, from the roles you play in your family to what you do for your community. That is also valuable.

The pathway to climate work is not linear; we’re still defining it. So I would encourage people, even if they don’t think they have the right background to get involved, to look into it anyway. Climate action involves issues that range from housing displacement to energy justice to food security, so there are a lot of different lenses from which you can look at climate – and a lot of areas of expertise you may have. Anyone that is interested belongs here.

What kinds of community organizations and other partners might want to engage with your work?
Anyone is welcome to email me if they’re interested in helping to address extreme heat! That includes staff in local governments, and service providers; we recently worked with a local nonprofit to distribute air conditioners to older adults and people with disabilities, and I’d love to connect about more opportunities to partner on work like that and find areas of overlap.