Article type
Abstract
Background:
The climate crisis threatens human health at an unprecedented scale. The impact of climate change on health is not evenly distributed and is affected by regional geography and vulnerability of the population residing there. Certain areas will be more prone to flooding, wildfires, heat waves, or polar vortexes. Official statistics that report these uneven impacts on human health are needed to facilitate strategic planning and resource allocation.
Purpose:
Identify globally defined indicators of the impacts of climate change on human health to inform the design of official statistics. This review supports work led by the UK Office for National Statistics and funded by Wellcome to develop a transparent, globally generalizable, and spatially scalable (from national to regional) framework and technical platform for official statistics on climate change, the environment, and health.
Methods:
We followed methods guidance for scoping reviews, including working from a comprehensive and reproducible search and adhering to the PRISMA_ScR reporting guidelines.
Results:
We systematically reviewed 4415 unique records and extracted 73 unique indicators and 33 repeated indicators from 23 sources. Temperature-related indicators were the most common (27%, 29/106), but many of these indicators were repeated. The human health category with the most unique indicators was air quality-related illness and mortality (29%, 21/73). Injury or illness indicators were more frequent than "mortality" indicators, with 59% (43/73) and 37% (27/73), respectively. Upon further breakdown of the categories into smaller, more specific outcomes, the most prevalent indicators were mortality from extreme weather events and illness due to zoonoses/vector-borne diseases with 10 and 9 occurrences. There was an absence/gap in climate change impacts on human health indicators for 5 of the secondary categories.
Conclusion:
The synthesis of climate-sensitive health indicators is crucial for establishing an official statistics framework to monitor the health impacts of climate change-related events. The abundance (and even gaps) of indicators across categories of human health effects is helpful for prioritization of (1) developing new indicators, (2) improving data availability, and (3) refining a cohesive official statistics framework.
The climate crisis threatens human health at an unprecedented scale. The impact of climate change on health is not evenly distributed and is affected by regional geography and vulnerability of the population residing there. Certain areas will be more prone to flooding, wildfires, heat waves, or polar vortexes. Official statistics that report these uneven impacts on human health are needed to facilitate strategic planning and resource allocation.
Purpose:
Identify globally defined indicators of the impacts of climate change on human health to inform the design of official statistics. This review supports work led by the UK Office for National Statistics and funded by Wellcome to develop a transparent, globally generalizable, and spatially scalable (from national to regional) framework and technical platform for official statistics on climate change, the environment, and health.
Methods:
We followed methods guidance for scoping reviews, including working from a comprehensive and reproducible search and adhering to the PRISMA_ScR reporting guidelines.
Results:
We systematically reviewed 4415 unique records and extracted 73 unique indicators and 33 repeated indicators from 23 sources. Temperature-related indicators were the most common (27%, 29/106), but many of these indicators were repeated. The human health category with the most unique indicators was air quality-related illness and mortality (29%, 21/73). Injury or illness indicators were more frequent than "mortality" indicators, with 59% (43/73) and 37% (27/73), respectively. Upon further breakdown of the categories into smaller, more specific outcomes, the most prevalent indicators were mortality from extreme weather events and illness due to zoonoses/vector-borne diseases with 10 and 9 occurrences. There was an absence/gap in climate change impacts on human health indicators for 5 of the secondary categories.
Conclusion:
The synthesis of climate-sensitive health indicators is crucial for establishing an official statistics framework to monitor the health impacts of climate change-related events. The abundance (and even gaps) of indicators across categories of human health effects is helpful for prioritization of (1) developing new indicators, (2) improving data availability, and (3) refining a cohesive official statistics framework.