Infectious disease decision-support tools and alert systems to build climate resilience to emerging health threats

General Information

Climate change is one of several drivers of recurrent outbreaks and geographical range expansion of zoonotic infectious diseases in Europe. Policy and decision-makers need tailored monitoring of climate-induced disease risk, and decision-support tools for timely early warning and impact assessment for proactive preparedness and timely responses. The abundance of open data in Europe allows the establishment of more effective, accessible, and cost-beneficial prevention and control responses. IDAlert will co-create novel policy-relevant pan-European indicators that track past, present, and future climate-induced disease risk across hazard, exposure, and vulnerability domains at the animal, human and environment interface. Indicators will be sub-national, and disaggregated through an inequality lens. We will generate tools to assess cost-benefit of climate change adaptation and mitigation measures across sectors and scales to reveal novel policy entry points and opportunities. Surveillance, early warning and response systems will be co-created and prototyped to increase health system resilience at regional and local levels, and explicitly reduce socio-economic inequality. Indicators and tools will be co-produced through multilevel engagement, innovative methodologies, existing and new data streams and citizen science, taking advantage of intelligence generated from selected hotspots in Spain, Greece, The Netherlands, Sweden, and Bangladesh that are experiencing rapid urban transformation and heterogeneous climate-induced disease threats.
For implementation, IDAlert has assembled European authorities in climate modelling, infectious disease epidemiology, social sciences, environmental economics, One Health and EcoHealth. Further, by engaging critical stakeholders from the start, IDAlert will ensure long-lasting impacts on EU climate policy, and provide new evidence and tools for the European Green Deal to strengthen population health resilience to climate change.

Hereon leads the work package entitled ‘Projecting infectious disease risk under climate change adaptation and mitigation scenarios’ where Hereon’s main contribution is the development and application of scenarios for projecting future infectious disease risk. Such projections should take into account changes in climate (temperature, rainfall), as well as in urban planning measures, related to blue and green infrastructure that affect the occurrence and transmission of diseases. Hereon also co-leads the work package ‘Capacity building and strengthening’ under which it will develop an E-Guide for the project. In addition, Hereon will contribute to policy analysis in selected case study areas.

EU-Programme Acronym and Subprogramme Area	HORIZON-HLTH-2021-ENVHLTH-02-03
Project Type	Research & Innovation Action (RIA)
Contract Number	Grant Agreement 101057554
Co-ordinator	Umea Universitet (SE)

Funding for the Project (€)	Funding for Hereon (€)
9,188,294	601,250

Contact Person at Hereon

Dr. Laurens Bouwer, Climate Service Center Germany (GERICS, KGK), Phone: +49 40 226 338 447, Dr. María Máñez Costa, Climate Service Center Germany (GERICS, KGN) Phone:+49 40 226 338 408 E-mail contact

Participants

Agencia de Salut Publica de Barcelona (ES), Barcelona Supercomputing Center - Centro Nacional de Supercomputacion (ES), Benaki Phytopathological Institute (GR), Centro Euro-Mediterraneo per i Cambiamenti Climatici SCARL (IT), Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas (ES), Erasmus Universitair Medisch Centrum Rotterdam (NL), International Centre For Diarrhoeal Disease Research Bangladesh (BD), IRIDEON SL (ES), London School of Economics and Political Science (UK), Statens Veterinaermedicinska Anstalt (SE), Stichting International Red Cross Red Crescent Centre On Climate Change And Disaster Preparedness (NL), Three O'Clock (FR), UMEA Universitet (SE), Universidad Pompeu Fabra (ES), Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (ES), Universität Leipzig (DE), Universitätsklinikum Heidelberg (DE), University College London (UK)

Last Update: 04. November 2022