The major motivation for tackling climate change, both at the individual and the policy levels, is the protection of the health of the current and future generation. While this has been said and claimed many times, actual data to monitor the burden of diseases attributable to climate change and to use such data for (i) formulating and evaluating climate policies and (ii) as evidence for legal actions, claim realization in the UNFCCC process and drives to divest in fossils are completely lacking.
The focus of this workshop is on low-and -middle income countries, who bear the brunt of health impacts of climate change, while having contributed the least to the problem. Furthermore they have the lowest capacity to adapt to the health and other consequences of climate change. This is why in recent years, notably at the COP27 in Sharm-el Sheik a groundswell has been created to compensate high impact/low-income countries for the damage inflicted by climate change, the so-called “loss-and damage mechanism”. During the COP28 in Dubai participating governments agreed on a 100b dollar loss-an-damage fund, hosted for the time being by the World Bank. It remains less clear, on which data and following which rules the L&D claims will be disbursed. Unfortunately, data on health damage from climate change are notoriously difficult to obtain in LMICs. The Routine information systems are patchy, rarely valid and above all, only representative for health facility users. We therefore need population-based health cum climate change data. All the more that the largest part of non-market adverse climate impacts is due to losses of health and life, as Nicolas Stern has shown (2016).
Hence, we focus in this workshop on:
1) simultaneous, continuous, population-based data on climate and health;
2) in low income countries;
3) for use in loss & damage claims, legal action and de-investing drives
Objectives
The workshop aims to be a starting point for collaboration among the hitherto unlinked scientific and policy communities on the following three objectives:
(i) facilitating the use of climate & health data for policy and legal purposes
(ii) joint presentation at COP29 (Baku) proposed for UNFCCC side event
(iii) ideas for collaborative research project.
Preliminary programme:
| Name | Title | Presentation |
| Part one: Set up of data collection and synthesis | ||
| Professor Osman Sankoh | Former Director, INDEPTH Network | Why are population health cohorts essential for measuring health and developing interventions? |
| Dr Ali Sié | Director, Nouna Health Research Centre/ Burkina Faso | CHEERS cohorts: adding simultaneous and local weather data to health data, the pioneering case of Nouna, Burkina Faso |
| Dr Sandra Barteit | Res. group leader digital health, HIGH | Sensors for measuring climate-relevant health and meteorological variables in CHEERS cohorts |
| Dr Kristine Belesova | Senior lecturer, School of Public Health, Imperial College London | Attributing mortality and migration data from CHEERS type cohorts to climate change model projections |
| Discussion | ||
| Part two: Translation of climate and health data for climate policy and litigation | ||
| Professor Rainer Sauerborn | Professor Climate change & global health, HIGH | Towards climate attributable burden of disease: Data for loss and damage claims/lawsuits etc. |
| Dr Joanna Seltzer | Associate Professor, Grantham Institute London School of Economics | Current state of climate lawsuits and their use of health data |
| Professor Marc-Philippe Weller | Vice-Rector of Heidelberg University | Legal texts to invoke for climate lawsuits and the suitability of health data to undergird the claims |
| Valentin Jahn | Lead analyst, LSE/ Grantham; Transition pathway Centre, LSE | De-investing in fossil industries: would health data help the argument |
| Discussion | ||