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15-TW-101* Models to predict health effects of climate change

Global warming is thought to influence the frequency and/or severity of many health threats, including communicable and chronic non-communicable diseases, trauma, and mental health disorders, among others. Vulnerable populations include elderly, children, poor and low-income societies around the world. Significant efforts are underway within multiple federal and international agencies to plan and finance adaptation to the changing climate. To inform these important efforts, quantitative models and estimates are greatly needed on the direct and indirect effects of climate change on disease burden and outcomes.

Purpose:

The impact of climate change on human health is likely to be complex and significant, including effects on cancers, cardiovascular and respiratory disease, food-, water-, and vector-borne diseases, heat-related illness, mental and social well-being, nutrition and trauma. Impacts are likely to be influenced by health status, socioeconomic status, public health infrastructure, and access to health care and environmental factors including land use.

The objective of this Challenge Grant opportunity is to support studies that use analytical and modeling approaches to quantify the current impacts of climate on disease burden and health outcomes and to project impacts of different climate and socio-economic scenarios on disease burden and health outcomes. There is also a critical need to evaluate the effectiveness of proposed climate adaptation efforts on human health and well-being, including biological, social and behavioral aspects.

Because climate-health connections are fundamentally interdisciplinary in scope, teams of investigators are likely to be most effective in addressing these problems. For example, teams of investigators may include molecular biologists, clinicians, epidemiologists, demographers, ecologists, economists and health systems analysts.

Priority topics:

Research topics may include but are not limited to:

• Development of improved predictive models of the health impacts of climate change at local and regional levels. We encourage the development of new and innovative approaches to downscale the output of general circulation models and develop local and regional health projections for different disease areas, including cancer, heart disease, lung disease, infectious diseases and mental health, among others.



• Identification and prediction of synergistic impacts of global warming on air pollutants and aeroallergens and their effects on health. We encourage studies that aim to quantify the impact of climate change on particulate matter exposure versus other factors influencing disease burden, such as changes in immune status.



• Characterization of the influence of climate change on infectious disease dynamics, including evaluation of the impact of climate change relative to other factors such as drug resistance and availability of health services, particularly in low- and middle-income countries or other low-resource environments.



• Development of approaches to quantify and predict the health impacts of alternative energy sources. Note that these impacts may differ depending the spatial scale of the energy production activity.



• Understanding and predicting the health impacts of extreme heat events as well as evaluating adaptation efforts that may reduce the burden of such events.

Contact:

Joshua Rosenthal, Ph.D.
Division of International Training and Research
Fogarty International Center
National Institutes of Health
Bethesda, MD 20892-2220
Tel. 301-496-1653
joshua_rosenthal@nih.gov

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