Bringing together research projects on heat and health
The ENBEL project brings together 11 research projects focusing on heat-related health issues, opening up for range of joint activities in this critical area of research.
This spring, the ENBEL project has conducted a survey and performed a document review of relevant climate change and health research projects funded by the Belmont Forum Climate Environment and Health Collaborative Research Action as well as EU funded Horizon 2020 projects. A recent report sums up the commonalities between the ENBEL partner projects in research methods, measures, populations and describes the potential areas where we can perform common activities across projects and generate shared outputs.
The report underlines that the ENBEL team can foster mutual learning and communication between projects and assist in outreach and dissemination activities, such as organising a large joint event with policymakers that cover a range of Belmont Forum and Horizon 2020 projects. In addition, the ENBEL team can secure raw data on health outcomes from climatic exposures through their network of partners.
Key opportunities for collaboration on heat and health
The opportunity for collaboration is especially true for the topic of heat as 11 projects focus on heat-related health issues:
AWARD-APR, which measures community resilience against diarrheal diseases tied to extreme weather events.
ACRoBEAR, which measures community resilience from wildfire air pollution and natural-focal disease.
CASCADES, which identifies how the risks of climate change beyond Europe might cascade into Europe.
CCCEHN, which contributes to understanding how to deal with collective action problems at the community level in a changing climate.
CHAMNHA, which explores the risks from heat on maternal and new-born health.
ClimApp, which builds a mobile phone application that integrates weather forecast data and human thermal models.
EXHAUSTION, which estimates temperatures and air pollution based on climate change projections to derive the ‘’costs’’ of health impact from extreme heat and air pollution.
HEAT-SHIELD, which models heat stress from weather forecast data on occupational health.
HEATCOST, which models cardiopulmonary health impacts as a result of extreme heat and air pollution under selected climate scenarios.
Micro-Poll, which models climate change, crop pollination networks and micronutrient intake in Nepal.
PREP, which measures the impact of chronic kidney disease (non-traditional cause) amongst workers in extreme heat.
Examples of opportunities for cross-learning
The projects CHAMNHA, HEAT-SHIELD and PREP assess interventions to reduce impacts of extreme heat on health via similar approaches. Furthermore, the three projects collect primary quantitative data directly from the study participants. The CHAMNHA project collects data among pregnant women in Burkina Faso and Kenya. HEAT-SHIELD gathers data among workers on heat stress symptoms, perceptions of heat exposure, work productivity and human physical responses to heat exposure in different sectors. PREP collects quantitative data on environmental measurements such as temperature and humidity, physiological measurements of workload, symptoms of heat stress, participants’ heart rate, core body temperature and biobanked serum and urine samples.
Although these projects cover different geographies and encompass different study populations, there may be opportunities for cross-learning. The climate scenario forecasting methods developed in HEAT-SHIELD might be applied to the findings of PREP. In turn, the PREP team already provided important technical inputs to measuring heat exposure and assessing intervention outcomes for a research proposal developed by the CHAMNHA team.
Find out more about commonalities and joint opportunities
Further results can be found in the report “Potential synergies between climate change and health projects funded by the Belmont Forum and Horizon 2020” produced by the team of ENBEL work package 3 on research syntheses led by Matthew Chersich (University of Witwatersrand) and Ilona M. Otto (University of Graz).