Taking globally consistent health impact projections to the next level

Balancing the health benefits and climate mortality costs of haemodialysis

Extensive work is underway to quantify the carbon footprint of specific healthcare interventions and identify ways to minimise healthcare-related emissions; however, it remains unclear how to balance the relative benefits from delivering healthcare with the harm from the associated carbon footprint. To estimate emissions-related harms, we used the Mortality Cost of Carbon, a recently developed metric from environmental economics, which presents the impacts of carbon emissions in the form of excess deaths. We convert deaths into years of life lost and compare this with the healthy life years gained, under two temperature scenarios: 'Dynamic Integrated Climate Economy Model with an Endogenous Mortality Response' (DICE-EMR) (2.4°C) and 'DICE-Baseline' (4.1°C). As a case study, we use haemodialysis, a life-prolonging intervention with a large carbon footprint. We estimate that 19-53 and 10-25 healthy life years are gained from haemodialysis per year of life lost from the associated emissions in the DICE-EMR and DICE-Baseline scenarios, respectively, depending on the country and treatment regimen. This brings the distribution of harms, benefits and tradeoffs inherent to the decarbonisation of healthcare into sharper focus. More fully accounting for the harm imposed by carbon emissions could result in better value investments to lower the carbon footprint of interventions and support the implementation of the net-zero healthcare agenda.

Climate change and public health in South America: a scoping review of governance and public engagement research

This scoping review examines peer-reviewed literature of governance and public engagement at the intersection of public health and climate change in South America. The review shows significant gaps in academic publications, particularly because health was mostly a secondary theme examined in the studies. The few studies about governmental interventions (e.g., policies and programs) suggest that these have not been effective. Regarding public engagement, no studies examined social media engagement with health and climate change, and only one examined news coverage. Finally, most articles focused primarily on individual countries, with few comparative or regional analyses of South America. Strategic action addressing climate change and its effects on public health needs to be based on empirical evidence.

Decision-support tools to build climate resilience against emerging infectious diseases in Europe and beyond

Climate change is one of several drivers of recurrent outbreaks and geographical range expansion of infectious diseases in Europe. We propose a framework for the co-production of policy-relevant indicators and decision-support tools that track past, present, and future climate-induced disease risks across hazard, exposure, and vulnerability domains at the animal, human, and environmental interface. This entails the co-development of early warning and response systems and tools to assess the costs and benefits of climate change adaptation and mitigation measures across sectors, to increase health system resilience at regional and local levels and reveal novel policy entry points and opportunities. Our approach involves multi-level engagement, innovative methodologies, and novel data streams. We take advantage of intelligence generated locally and empirically to quantify effects in areas experiencing rapid urban transformation and heterogeneous climate-induced disease threats. Our goal is to reduce the knowledge-to-action gap by developing an integrated One Health-Climate Risk framework.