Developing climate cohorts to understand health associations and resilience and susceptibility factors in Ghana

Icahn School Of Medicine At Mount Sinai, New York NY

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Abstract

Project summary Global health gains achieved over the past half century are at risk of being eroded by climate change, which disproportionately affects low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). In LMICs, scientific and policy planning capacity to incorporate climate compatible strategies into climate sensitive areas like the health sector is severely hampered by the lack of empirically derived estimates of local climate sensitivities from their countries and, critical for policy, an understanding of population-specific resilience and susceptibility factors. Indeed, recent climate sensitivities relied on data from LMICs with large scale administrative data (Brazil, China) as a proxy for the African continent. Despite this major limitation, these data suggest that the effect of temperature on mortality in susceptible groups will be ~50% larger in regions for which there is no available data, such as Africa. We propose to build climate science expertise in Ghana by mentored research and the development of two reinforcing sets of “climate cohorts.” We will leverage the well-characterized, extant Ghana Randomized Air Pollution and Health Study to examine associations between climatic exposures on maternal-child health. We will also begin work with the Kintampo Health and Demographic Surveillance System (KHDSS) to prepare for future climate work leveraging this rich data resource. This work will begin to refine climate health sensitivity estimates, provide key insights into resilience and susceptibility factors, and fill urgently-needed policy and practice-relevant evidence gaps. A long-term goal of this project is to provide a framework for continued climate science in Ghana and a model for other African countries with similar extant cohorts, to collectively catalyze climate research on the African continent.