- 1Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC), Barcelona, Spain(rachel.lowe@bsc.es)
- 2London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, London, United Kingdom
- 3Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced Studies (ICREA), Barcelona, Spain
- 4School of Public Health, Imperial College London, London, United Kingdom
- 5Institute for Global Health, University College London, London, United Kingdom
- 6United Nations Children's Fund, Division of Data Analytics Planning and Monitoring, Florence, Italy
The use of epidemiological indicators and platforms are an essential tool in infectious disease early warning systems and provide an interpretable snapshot of health risks globally to a range of end users including scientists, medical practitioners, policy makers, non-governmental organisations and the general public. Climate-sensitive infectious diseases (CSIDs) are a group of diseases which are considered to be at least in part driven by changes in climatic conditions, and include a range of water-borne, air-borne and vector-borne diseases, many of which are also zoonotic. There are a range of CSID indicators which have currently been developed and published, such as those presented in the Lancet Countdown and their regional reports, along with platforms such as EpiOutlook, to communicate indicator results and provide seasonal forecasts and projections. A demographic poorly served by most indicators and platforms for CSIDs are children, despite them facing a high burden of infectious diseases globally and being disproportionately impacted by climate change. In 2022, 13,400 children under the age of five died every day, with the greatest contributor to these deaths coming from infectious diseases. Climate change can impact children's development, including via CSIDs, leading to lifelong poor health outcomes. Here, we propose leveraging our existing knowledge of CSIDs and indicator development, to co-create indicators to specifically estimate exposure in children, in collaboration with UNICEF. We aim to take a global approach to investigate key vector-, water- and air-borne diseases which are both climate sensitive and have a high burden in children such as malaria, cholera and meningitis, respectively. The indicators will be based on threshold-based models of key climatic drivers for these diseases, and any additional risk factors, such as land use and travel. The models will use ERA5 global gridded climate datasets and Copernicus land use data, to provide an estimated proportion of the child population (<19 years old) which live in areas that are at risk of these key diseases. The results will be stratified by additional socio-economic factors which are important for many CSIDs, including the rural/urban populations and poverty according to UNICEF’s multidimensional child poverty data. We hope these indicators can be used in CSID platforms, or via standalone reports to provide additional insights into the impacts of climate change on children.
How to cite: Lowe, R., Charnley, G. E. C., Kim, D., and Swaminathan, R. S.: Developing epidemiological indicators to understand the burden of climate-sensitive infectious diseases on children , EGU General Assembly 2025, Vienna, Austria, 27 Apr–2 May 2025, EGU25-12176, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu25-12176, 2025.