Climate change poses unprecedented challenges to global health, demanding innovative solutions to mitigate its impact. Understanding the interrelation of weather, environmental factors, and health outcomes is complex, and requires both integrated data and interdisciplinary expertise. The impacts of climate change have been shown to hit people in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) the hardest – whether through increases in the spread of infectious disease outbreaks, or damage and death from floods, droughts, or other extreme weather events. Strengthening health systems in LMICs in the face of climate change means making them climate resilient. This means developing systems that help national and local health authorities understand the specific climate-related threats posed to their populations and that facilitate targeted actions that reduce the impact on human health.
Developing and scaling innovative digital tools for climate and health through the DHIS2 platform
Starting in March 2024, the HISP Centre at UiO began a 2-year, £4.5 million climate and health action research project funded by the Wellcome Trust. Through this project, led by Professor Kristin Braa, we have collaborated with local, regional, and global partners across disciplines to develop innovative climate and health solutions based on the open-source DHIS2 platform that address local needs–such as access to digitized weather and environmental data and analytical outputs that are relevant to priority health programs–and leverage existing local DHIS2 capacity, systems, and data in LMICs. These innovations have been developed into a generic DHIS2 Climate and Health toolkit that is freely available for use around the world. In addition to helping countries respond, learnings from this project contribute to the global body of knowledge on the impact of climate change on human health, helping inform policy, planning, and funding on a global scale. Learn more about our progress on the DHIS2 website: https://dhis2.org/climate/
“DHIS2 is by far the most widely deployed health information management system, and the team brings a holistic, socio-technical approach to its development and implementation, working closely with the communities they support. We’re pleased to be supporting the team to develop and maintain this essential digital health infrastructure, which will help deliver effective healthcare and high-quality research to understand and adapt to the effects of climate change on human health.”
~ Tariq Khokhar, Head of Data for Science and Health, Wellcome
Facilitating development and use of predictive modeling tools for climate-sensitive disease forecasting, early warning and response
Early warning and response systems have been proposed as a cost-effective and reliable solution to improve climate resilience of national health systems. Several spatiotemporal models have been developed for forecasting incidence of vector- and water-borne diseases like malaria, dengue and cholera. While these approaches often employ sophisticated statistical modeling and show good predictive accuracy, they require substantial manual effort to develop for each country and disease setting, and are implemented through bespoke software tools that are not integrated with the routine Health Management Information Systems (often based on DHIS2) that are used in LMICs for planning, monitoring, and evaluating health program. This makes it challenging to operationalize these tools over longer periods and to scale beyond individual country and disease contexts. While there are potentially useful open-source models available, there is a gap in translating this research into automated, packaged tools. In addition, the majority of LMICs face gaps in the availability of the granular, digitized climate data these models require. The result is that early warning and response systems for climate-sensitive diseases have not reached widespread use in LMICs.
To address this gap, the HISP Centre formed a team of machine learning, software engineering, and information systems experts, led by Geir Kjetil Sandve, to develop the DHIS2 Chap Modeling Platform, a collaborative and open platform for harmonizing climate and health data, as well as importing, training, tuning, assessing, and sharing predictive models for climate-informed disease forecasting. Chap is developed by HISP to integrate seamlessly with DHIS2, combining health data in national DHIS2 systems with climate, weather, and environmental data from a variety of sources to run and compare predictive models and power early warning systems that are both locally customizable, scalable across disease programs and countries, and ready to operationalize within existing national systems.
If you are interested in learning more or getting involved in our work in predictive modeling and disease forecasting, we invite you to connect with the Chap team:
- Learn more: https://chap.dhis2.org/
- Join our Chap discussion forum on the DHIS2 Community of Practice
- Send us an email: chap@dhis2.org
Building an interdisciplinary network for global and local collaboration
To provide the interdisciplinary expertise required for this project, the HISP Centre has partnered with subject matter experts from internationally recognized research groups and global health organizations working at the intersection of climate and health, and we have forged partnerships with stakeholders and research partners in LMICs through the global HISP network.
Meet the team
Learn more about the interdisciplinary HISP Climate & Health project team.