This community innovation has been accepted at the 2025 DHIS2 Annual Conference
Official Statistics on Climate-health interactions
The Standards for Official Statistics on Climate-health Interactions (SOSCHI) project is developing a set of indicators that measure climate related health outcomes to support policy change. It aims to develop a globally generalisable, user friendly and innovative methodology and online platform to produce and communicate climate and health related statistics. The indicator topics cover air pollution, heat- and cold-related mortality, mental health and more. The SOSCHI framework will be hosted on our online platform. This innovative and interactive platform enables users to quantify climate-health impacts using their own data or globally available datasets. Users can run the indicator calculators and obtain results via the platform’s intuitive interface or download the open-source package, enabling the framework to be accessible for all technical abilities. Project partners include in the Regional Institute for Population Studies (RIPS), Ghana, and African Institute for Mathematical Sciences (AIMS), Rwanda, the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA), Cochrane, topic experts and academics in climate epidemiology. We are also working with the UN Statistical Commission and the WHO to ensure alignment with global standards and practical utility. To strengthen national health systems, we are exploring the integration of DHIS2 and other data into our online platform. Our partners in Ghana and Rwanda are testing some of the indicators using DHIS2 data. This integration will allow health authorities to link climate exposure data with real world health outcomes, facilitating better climate health surveillance and informed policymaking. Our intervention provides national and local health systems with validated climate health metrics to inform policy change and support global surveillance efforts. We believe that our project is relevant to the DHIS2 community.
Primary Author: Kenechi Omeke
Keywords:
Climate and health, climate epidemiology, climate-health indicators, statistical frameworks, health surveillance, climate resilience, standardised indicators, chemical contaminants, heat, cold-related mortality, morbidity, heatwaves, health systems and facilities, mortality, extreme weather events, flooding, wildfires, drought, storms, malnutrition, food-borne diseases, mental health, psychosocial health, respiratory illnesses, non-communicable diseases, vector-borne diseases, water-borne diseases, water-related health impacts, zoonoses, DHIS2 integration, statistical framework, policy support, climate adaptation, environmental health, data integration, policymaking, environmental health, global standards, open-source platform.
We have progressed methods development for the following priority topics:
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Air pollution
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Extreme weather events – wildfires
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Heat and cold
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Mental health
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Vector-borne diseases
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Water-borne diseases
We have produced corresponding topic introduction/methods development documents for them. You can read all on Zenodo at: Search Standards for Official Statistics on Climate-Health Interactions (SOSCHI)
We developed an R package for implementing the underlying statistical frameworks. This package takes the user health and climate data and produces indicators on health-related outcomes for the given climatic hazard(s). As mentioned in the abstract, you can use our online platform to produce the same indicators for selected topics without writing any code. The platform also has all the project documentation and links to our publications. You can access the platform here: Climate Health Platform. Take it for a spin and let us know what you think!