Risk assessment of the impact of climate change on human health and well-being

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Assessment of the potential impact of future climate change on human health and well-being (the latter via effects on animal health) is hindered by the sheer number of pathogens, their diversity, varied linkages to climate and ecosystems and, often, lack of data. Here we propose to exploit a unique database developed at the University of Liverpool which will soon contain a set of records for all known pathogens of humans and domestic animals. We will use expertise present within the University of Liverpool, the international co-investigators and our project partners to generate a subset of the list, namely all those pathogens that occur in proximity to the UK, France and the Netherlands or threaten these countries; are of major impact in terms of the magnitude and likelihood of impact on human health or well-being; and have epidemiological linkages to temperature or moisture levels in air or the environment and, hence, may be expected to be susceptible to the effects of climate change. This subset of diseases will be subjected to qualitative or quantitative risk assessment to estimate how they will change (in terms of distribution, incidence and severity) under scenarios of future climate change within the next half-century. Our underlying principle is that the data and pathways on which our conclusions are based should be fully recorded, referenced and transparent; as better data become available, it will be possible to update the model outputs. A benefit of our approach is that it is 'bottom-up', at the start giving equal weight to all possible pathogens that could be affected by climate change, and then reducing the list according to agreed criteria. This approach is balanced, allowing the conclusion, for example, that the highest-impact pathogens are largely insensitive to climate change. By contrast, most previous assessments of the impacts of climate change are top-down, starting (and often ending) with the premise that a few key vector-borne pathogens of (usually) humans (malaria, dengue, yellow fever) need urgent consideration. We will listen closely to stakeholders and end-users while designing our risk assessment pathways, and wish to communicate our scientific approaches and findings to them effectively. To the end, we plan to adopt participatory methods throughout the project.