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Climate Change and Human Health in the Developing World

Researchers: Teevrat Garg (GPS) and Maulik Jaganani (Cornell)
Location: Global

While the threat of climate change represents a challenge for policymakers and households across the world, the problem is most acute in poor countries. There are several channels through which climate stressors impact human health and productivity, including heat-induced mortality, infectious diseases such as malaria, and malnutrition due to crop failures. The research team plans to construct a comprehensive global dataset on disease and health outcomes and expenditures, geo-linked with climate, pollution, and night lights data. They will then be able to address questions such as how vulnerability to the disease effects of weather and climate vary by income. 

Results

Researchers have been working to combine geo-located individual level observations on disease prevalence, health expenditures and other socio-economic variables from the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) with daily gridded data on temperature, precipitation and humidity from the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts and with remote sensing data on pollutants. Preliminary analysis and generation of impact maps is underway.