Understanding the Climate-Accelerated Health Challenge

Climate change affects our health through extreme weather events, the spread of diseases, threats to food and water, damage to health facilities, and unequal impacts on vulnerable populations. Many health concerns are influenced by weather and climate, and the effects can be felt both directly and indirectly.

For instance, in addition to the direct health impacts that extreme heat and frequent flooding have on people, infectious diseases become more of a threat as breeding grounds for vectors such as mosquitoes expand and disease ‘seasons’ become longer and more unpredictable.

The Humanitarian OpenStreetMap (HOT) and the open mapping community have a long history of collaboration with local communities and partners on mapping to support better health outcomes. In 2014, we co-founded the Missing Maps project with Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) and the British and American Red Cross in order to make sure critical geospatial data was in place for humanitarian response - with a strong focus on public health and epidemiology.

In 2017, HOT’s mapping volunteers made more than 5 million edits to OpenStreetMap in order to support Clinton Health Access Initiative (CHAI) and the Botswana Ministry of Health and Wellness, amongst others, with malaria elimination campaigns.

In 2019, in Burundi, MSF used open mapping tools and data to improve the speed and coverage of indoor residual spraying (IRS) as a means of managing an outbreak of malaria in Burundi.

More recently, we’ve been working with partners in Dhaka, Lilongwe, and Kadoma City to develop open mapping strategies to monitor and manage cholera and dengue risks within their communities, as well as supporting Freetown City Council in using their data to plan and implement extreme heat adaptations.

While these experiences highlight how open community mapping and data can strengthen climate‑sensitive health responses, we also know that there is potential for much greater impact. New tech has emerged, making mapping even more accessible, and new networks of partners and communities are adopting open mapping tools and methods to create and use the data they need, and the trust in open, community-generated data is increasing across government and institutional partners.

Thanks to funding from the Wellcome Trust, HOT now has the opportunity to explore what this potential could mean for climate health use cases and develop strategies to better support health research, practice, and advocacy.

Join the Climate Health x Open Mapping Conversation

Our team of open mapping experts is looking to engage with researchers, practitioners, and experts-by-experience from all tiers of the health and climate sector, from disaster risk experts, food security, public health practitioners, researchers in geospatial/open data working in health, community resilience-focused organizations, and others, to gather initial insights and ideas.

We aim to explore questions like: What are the existing data access, delivery, or use gaps? How can current map data implementation approaches be improved? Is there potential for community-based mapping methodologies to improve existing processes? What role is there for new and adapted tools in these workflows?

By asking these questions, we hope to understand the contributions that new and different open mapping tools, datasets, models, methodologies, etcetera can make to the climate health sector to truly address health needs at a local level.

If you’d like to join the conversation, fill out this form, and we’ll reach out to you to set up a meeting with you.

Funded by Wellcome

About Wellcome: Wellcome supports science to solve the urgent health challenges facing everyone. We support discovery research into life, health and wellbeing, and we’re taking on three worldwide health challenges: mental health, infectious disease and climate and health.