Piloting the collection of geographic information from Longitudinal Population Studies for future climate-health research

Project leads: Natalia Tejedor Garavito

Team: Amy Bonnie, Tim O’Riordan

Funding: Wellcome Trust

Start: Apr 2022
Completion: Dec 2023

Climate change poses the biggest threat to low- and middle-income countries ability to achieve Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) – especially in attaining health equality (SDG3). This project aims to provide decision-makers with a useful tool that will enable them to identify which countries and regions are affected by climate-driven impacts on health.

Together with colleagues at the afrimapr project (Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine) and Talarify (based in South Africa) we are working to help unlock the potential of combining health monitoring data with climate datasets to improve our understanding of the impact of climate on human health. Our research partnership is seeking longitudinal population studies that contain geographic data. The objective is to encourage data owners to share their data and pilot an open-source tool that demonstrates the value of open geographic data.

Our key project outputs include:

  • Check, clean, update and add metadata of existing Health and Demographic Surveillance Systems (HDSS) datasets.
  • Add new HDSS site shapefile data.
  • Publish the full set of HDSS site shapefile data.
  • Develop specifications for an online interface for LPS geographic data capturing that would cope with larger quantities of data and users.