This blog by European Centre for Environment and Human Health‘s Prof Lora Fleming first appeared in The Conversation.

We collect climate data. We collect health data. What if we combined the two?

As the world wakes up to the power of data, we need to start working out how to join up all this information. We need to turn it into meaningful findings that will help us to make changes to the way we live. A new technique is emerging as part of this quest – the data mashup. This approach to linking data could help us shed light on phenomena such as the health impacts of climate change.

Data comes in all shapes and sizes. It can record boundless sets of characteristics over different time scales and geographic areas. But this diversity means that individual databases are often created for specific areas, such as health research, and are rarely shared or combined with others.

Yet it is becoming increasingly apparent that by joining these disparate sources of data, academia, governments and businesses may be able to access information that is currently hidden within closed systems. So researchers are now turning to techniques developed by computer scientists in order to access this Aladdin’s cave of information.

The Medical and Environmental Data Mashup Infrastructure (MEDMI) project is one of the initiatives doing this. We’re hoping to enable research into the links between climate, weather, environment and health. By bringing databases from each of these areas together and allowing access through one web-based portal, we’re aiming to create a shared resource for medical, environmental, and public health researchers.

The collection of health and environment data over the past 20 years has provided a growing resource of information. It includes detailed monitoring of weather and climate variables like temperature and rainfall and digital health records, among other useful additions.

With this information, you could combine temperature and air pollution data to predict when people with chronic lung disease might have respiratory problems if they go outside. The UK Met Office did this and now provides an early warning service for patients, their families and healthcare providers.

But joining such varied forms of data presents some significant hurdles. For a start, in many cases we are at the mercy of the way data has been collected historically. Pollen data, for example, traditionally suffers from a lack of resolution. Only a few measurement locations cover the whole of the UK but pollen moves rapidly in the air all over the place. These differences in resolution over time and space make it difficult to identify links with other more finely recorded factors, such as individuals with certain types of skin cancer and radon levels in a particular area.

The huge disparities in data collection are even more apparent when considering other environment and health variables. Take rainfall or cloud cover data for example, which are measured on an hourly basis, at very high resolution, over the whole of the UK.

It might be interesting to combine large scale environmental data with the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children, which followed the pregnancies of 14,000 mothers in the Avon Valley, to see if solar irradiance (a measure of vitamin D levels) exposure is related to the development of allergic diseases. But this is difficult to do because the Avon study only collects data every couple of years and the participants predominantly live in a small geographic area.

Bridging the gaps

Merging data types ranging from a description of a person’s mental health to measurements of ocean currents, requires some serious head scratching. Fortunately, statistical techniques and methods such as Geographic Information Systems (GIS) provide us with a really good start, and the standardisation of spatial data services by the Open Geospatial Consortium has begun to create a common international language between databases. There is also a growing interest from the private sector, with companies like Google dedicating resources to connecting data and enabling access over the web.

Perversely (to health researchers at least), the link between the changing climate and human health has received little scientific attention, particularly when compared to investigating how climate affects the weather and environment. We’re hoping that MEDMI will begin to redress this trend by allowing us to investigate where climate and health data overlap.

For example, we want to identify risk hot spots – places where climate and other environmental factors converge to affect vulnerable populations – early enough to both mitigate the consequences and study these interventions.

The sheer number of partners working on the project highlights the dizzying complexity of any mashup endeavour. And of course there is the veritable minefield of protecting confidential and sensitive health data. The importance of that cannot be overstated.

But scientists like me, already committed to the data mashup cause, aren’t fazed by these challenges. We’re already looking towards a future where these linked databases can be queried in real time.

We’re imagining a world where a regional cold snap can be associated with flu cases and hospital admissions as it happens. That would mean local resources could be quickly and efficiently deployed. We’re hoping that long-term predictions about climate and human health hot spots can help us to plan our cities so that they are more resilient.

Living in a world undergoing rapid environmental change will increasingly require this kind of vision. We’re not there yet, not even close, but just like television on your mobile phone, we may get there sooner than you think.

Professor Neil Adger is Geography Professor; in this blog, he discusses the implications that climate change will have for human health and security.

This blog first appeared in The Carbon Blog on 7 April 2014.

No place is immune to the impacts of climate change. This is the principal message from the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report. The impacts of climate change will be felt in individual places such as in back gardens, homes, fields and cities and will likely make us feel less safe and secure.

For the first time the IPCC examines in detail the impacts of climate change on well-being across its Working Group 2 report, with a cluster of chapters on the topics of health, human security, and poverty.

Human security encapsulates the notion of the vital core of human lives and the ability of people to have freedom and the capacity to live with dignity. Human security has direct material elements, such as life and livelihood, but also elements of cultural expression and identity.

The notion of human security captures a central part of how the impacts of climate change, as they unfold, will affect values and things that people care about beyond, for example, its economic costs.

The IPCC report finds that the impacts of climate change are evident and being documented across all continents and in the oceans. Given emissions trajectories and lags in the climate system, the world is committed to warming over the coming decades that will increase risks in the natural world, and for major sensitive sectors of the economy. So how do these impacts translate into human security?

Health 

First, health. The report shows that climate change has already contributed to human ill-health in recent decades. While it may not be the dominant burden of disease, there is now strong evidence of increased heat-related mortality as a result of warming.

These are not likely to be offset by decreased cold-related mortality, because of the influence of seasonal factors other than temperature on winter mortality.

And climate affects health through other mechanisms: localised changes in temperature and rainfall, for example, have altered the distribution of some water-borne illnesses and disease vectors. The report gives stark warning of how these risks increase with projected warming over the incoming decades.

How and where we live

Second, climate change will have an impact on how and where people live and the decisions they make about moving. Displacement of populations as a result of extreme weather events is usually involuntary and often taken as a last resort, but has major public health and policy consequences.

Most displacement is temporary but often amplifies migration trends. The impacts of Hurricane Katrina in Louisiana and New Orleans in 2005 show that temporary displacement of populations from flood impacts leads to highly differential permanent migration patterns. While wealthier populations returned, such displacement changed the demographics of the whole region.

Governments are also planning for the movement of people, given some impacts already observed or expected. In Alaska, for example, some coastal towns, where roads, ports and other services are badly affected by melting permafrost, are planning their movements.

Such planned resettlement could be positive, but there is much experience of such schemes where residents really do not wish to move and schemes fail to protect the integrity of community.

Migration experts Robin Bronen and Terry Chapin, working with Alaskan towns and government authorities, have argued that only inclusive and patient engagement with such communities can avoid the trauma and stress of such major life upheavals.

Conflict 

Finally, climate change affects the risks of conflict. Learning from the political and social sciences in this area is essential to put climate risks in context. The IPCC assessment, in effect, concludes that conflict risks are an area of concern for two reasons.

First, it is difficult to say decisively whether climate change impacts will exacerbate conflict risks, and in many ways the past is not such a good guide to the future.

Second, there are good reasons to deduce that climate risks may enhance conflict. Factors that themselves are common to many recent conflicts, such as poverty and economic shocks, are themselves sensitive to climate change.

Hence climate change may not directly be implicated in triggering conflict. And greed, grievance and other factors may be dominant in many types of violence. But that is not a reason to dismiss this risk. Indeed, this area needs much more work.

One clear conclusion of the IPCC’s assessment is, for example, that places in conflict and recovering from conflict are much more susceptible and have many fewer resources for dealing with weather extremes and climate variability.

 The bottom line

In summary, climate change will affect things we care about, including the security of the places we live, the local environment as we experience it, and health. The IPCC assessment has for the first time given prominence to these broader questions. It rightly concludes that the future is still in our hands. Taking the right action means we can build a safer and more resilient world.

In honour of World Health Day, Anthropology lecturer Dr Ann Kelly has written a blog on the battle against Malaria.

Benito Mussolini once boasted that his anti-malarial campaign would place a pig under every peasant’s bed. Characteristically grandiose, ‘the Grand Bonification’ combined public health measures with hydraulic engineering, housing construction, novel agrarian technologies and cultivation techniques – a totalitarian vision that linked disease control to the creation of a new class of farmers and the regeneration of the Italian economy. While more propaganda than viable social policy, freeing marshes from the shadow of the fever entailed nothing less than a social and political revolution.

The theme of this year’s World Health Day is vector-borne diseases – a set of public health scourges affecting disproportionately the poor in the Global South. Disease vectors – mosquitoes, ticks, snails – thrive in areas that, in the WHO’s words, “have been left behind by development”. To a certain degree all communicable diseases map onto socio-economic inequalities, the correlation between poverty and vector-borne diseases such as Malaria, Yellow Fever, Dengue, Onchocerciasis and Shistosomiasis is amplified.

Public health experts agree that improved infrastructure – e.g. the pavement of roads, the building of structurally-sound and screened houses, the construction of drains, filtration and sanitation systems – constitutes the most effective strategy in reducing the transmission of pathogens. Thus, in focusing on vector-borne diseases, the WHO brings to the foreground the link between health outcomes and development, disease control and civil engineering.

Malaria is the most famous and, in terms of overall fatalities, deadliest of all vector-borne diseases; the fraught history of its control is the backdrop of the WHO 2014 brief. The discovery at the turn of the twentieth century, by Ronald Ross and others, that some mosquito species of the Anopheles genus were a central component of the malaria transmission cycle opened new courses of public health action focused on prevention rather than clinical care. Across Europe, the USSR, the Americas and Africa, comprehensive programmes of environmental management sought to uproot the mosquito from the landscape through the introduction of engineering works, the pre-planning of urban settlements, and the management and systematic destruction of An. gambiae breeding habitats, from marshland to footprint, septic tank to coconut shell.

These methods are, needless to say, labour intensive and logistically complex and stand in an uneasy relationship to other forms of anti-malarial action. While arguably less effective in the long run, the mass distribution of quinine to treat the disease was cheaper and did not require specialist engineering or entomological expertise. In tropical climates where breeding grounds were abundant and infrastructure weak, Robert Koch’s dictum, ‘treat the patient, not the mosquito’ made a certain financial if not epidemiological sense and throughout the early twentieth century, policies that focused on the life of the Plasmodium parasite in infected humans, rather than on the insects that carry the parasite into and out of the human body, gained the upper hand.

The invention of powerful insecticides such as DDT obviated this debate, enabling a far more direct approach to reducing transmission. Rather than seeking out mosquitoes, one simply needed to spray extensively to kill female anopheles mosquitoes in large numbers. The large-scale domestic application of insecticides or, Indoor Residual Spray (IRS), was the central strategy of the global eradication campaign of the 1950s and 1960s. DDT effectively de-coupled malaria control from the topography of urban settlements – design of sluices and dikes – and linked it instead with the power of a single-bullet technology.

The demarcation of malaria from development tallied with the post-war institutionalization of public health: the creation of the WHO as distinct from agencies such as the International Monetary Fund or the World Bank narrowed the scope of public health initiatives, while the internationalization of public health centralized medical expertise in Geneva and New York.

The ecological consequences of that campaign re powerfully chronicled by Rachel Carson in Silent Spring. Its epidemiological impact – e.g., the spreading of insecticide resistance, the shifts in mosquito behaviour to avoid sprayed surfaces, and critically, the exhaustion and retreat of the global health community from malaria control – are apparent in the current framing of anti-malaria campaigns. The WHO’s emphasis on vector-borne diseases acknowledges the entanglement of disease in broader questions of social improvement. The control of vectors is not simply a matter of the development and application of a technological innovation; the deep entrenchment of mosquitoes and other disease carriers in the fabric of everyday life demands attention to the particular contexts in which humans, vectors and pathogens come into contact.

Vector-borne diseases are resolutely local – vector control, to quote the WHO report “is a national development issue.” That recognition is not a matter of shifting responsibilities, but rather of disseminating the awareness that when it comes to interrupting the transmission of disease community-based approaches are the best way forward. We are reminded of the advice of Ronald Ross not to make mosquito abatement dependent on the resolution of difficult scientific questions, and to rely instead on the systematic and relentless application of what is already known, on the thorough implementation of what is doable from the very start.

All this looks very formidable on paper. It is not so in reality. A very few men working day after day will do wonders in the course of a few months. The great thing is to make a beginning: not to form counsels of perfection, not to measure means with ends, but simply to set to work with whatever force there is available, however small it may be. A single private citizen can eradicate malaria from a whole town. In an enterprise of this nature, the means grow as the work proceeds (Ross 1901: 31).

By Dr Stewart Barr, Associate Professor in Geography

Do you ‘decide’ to recycle, switch your thermostat down or turn off the tap to save water? Although many of us might use this kind of language to describe some of our pro-environmental behaviours, a closer look at how we live our lives reveals that far from being conscious and rationally judged decisions, most of our everyday behaviours are habitual – ‘practices’ that are part of our daily routine as we go about normal life.

Such a conclusion helps us to understand why people often express concern for the environment and an intention to engage in a variety of pro-environmental behaviours like recycling but do not reflect this in their behaviours. This has become an increasing concern for policy makers and businesses in engaging members of the public in environmental campaigns because it illustrates that providing information and marketing alone to promote shifts in behaviours often fails to achieve the desired results.

If information and exhortations to change behaviours are ineffective, then what influences the habits – or practices – that we all engage in on a daily basis? To answer this question, we need to look at the ways in which we all so easily slip into routines as a way of handling the everyday management of life. In this way, rather than trying to rationalise the ‘barriers’ and ‘motivations’ for a pro-environmental behaviour like recycling, the most recent social science research indicates that the complexity of our contemporary lifestyles means that people need to find strategies for managing all of the different demands on their time, such as paid work, cooking, cleaning, looking after children, shopping and, yes, dealing with ‘the rubbish’. In our research for Coca-Cola Enterprises, participants referred to this process as ‘managing everyday life’, which many of them found was a task in itself.

This ‘management of living’ helps to explain why explicit messages to promote behaviours like recycling can often be so easily by-passed in the maelstrom of everyday life. As participants in our research argued, when asked why they didn’t recycle certain products: ‘Well, it simply goes in that bin’. Such remarks illustrate the habitual nature of most of the things we do at home and lead us to look for new ways to shift habits that are not so dependent on information and the assumption that all we need is better knowledge.

Research has shown that most of our everyday recycling behaviours are habitual.

Recent research in the social sciences has argued that practitioners can effectively intervene in the habit-forming process through what are called ‘moments of change’. Pioneered in travel behaviour research, this strand of social science explores the ways in which changes in peoples’ lives, such as moving home, having children, or investing in a new kitchen or bathroom, can act as key points at which old habits are lost and new ones rapidly formed. Such research gets at the very essence of the relationship that we as humans have with the environment around us (such as a new home or kitchen) and the ways we have to negotiate using that space with others (spouse, children, and lodgers).

How can we intervene in this process to create moments of change? We might consider two ways of promoting habit formation within such ‘moments’. First, we are all attuned to the environment around us and there is clear evidence that getting the ‘choice architecture’ right is critical. This means that as households move into new environments (a new home, new kitchen), there are major opportunities for framing how people develop habits through the inclusion of technologies and spaces that promote behaviours like recycling. For example, how may of you have had a kitchen in which receptacles for different recyclables was included?

Second, the process of habit formation in new spaces and life situations needs to be something that is co-created between manufacturers and consumers. This is a relatively unknown world, despite the fact that designers work closely with consumers on many key products already (like new homes and kitchens). Yet such collaborations rarely incorporate practices like recycling, waste management or indeed water and energy management. There are major opportunities for collaborative design projects that could place effective waste management and recycling at the heart of their work, and which recognise the importance of creating better harmony between the demands of everyday living and the spaces and technologies that facilitate real change – enabling ‘a break in habit to create a new habit’.