Health
Climate change is the most significant global health threat in the 21st century. Extreme weather events rise in sea level, flooding, drought, poor air quality, and socio-economic inequalities increase the risk of infectious disease epidemics. Climate services for health can facilitate the generation of knowledge to build resilience in climate change hotspots, areas that are vulnerable to health threats.
What we do
We apply a transdisciplinary approach to co-designing policy-relevant methodological solutions to enhance surveillance, preparedness and response to climate-sensitive disease outbreaks and health outcomes.
We conduct cutting-edge methodological research on disentangling the impacts of global environmental change on infectious disease risk and co-developing impact-based forecasting models at sub-seasonal to decadal timescales in collaboration with public health, disaster risk management, and humanitarian agencies.
Software engineers and data scientists work together with stakeholders to create climate services based on health risk models that can facilitate access to multidisciplinary risk knowledge and increase capacity. These tools can be user-tailored to identify and target the most vulnerable areas or populations in a particular region.
Climate-informed decisions resulting from applied climate services can save lives and reduce case burden since health systems and communities can better prepare for extreme weather events. Robust health risk models can also help to inform national and international discussions about climate mitigation and adaptation policies and the economic consequences of action and inaction.
Success Story
Tracking progress on health and climate change
We host the European regional center of the Lancet Countdown, a transdisciplinary research collaboration whose mission is to monitor health and climate change in the European region.
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Our partners and collaborators
Some of the companies and institutions that collaborate with us
