International Population and Agricultural Census Data for Environmental Health Research

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Project Summary/Abstract Understanding and mitigating the health impacts of climate change and other environmental exposures requires information on population and agricultural characteristics at the community level—a key scale for decision- making and action. Population and housing censuses and agricultural censuses provide in-depth, community- scale data on demographics, education, employment, and living conditions as well as on farming inputs, practices, and productivity. Currently, these data are difficult to access and use for research and decision- making. While nearly every country conducts regular censuses, the results are published independently by hundreds of statistical agencies, often in reports designed for reading rather than for analysis. The proposed project—the IPUMS International Historical Geographic Information System (IPUMS IHGIS)—will assemble these data in an analysis-ready, standardized, and fully documented collection and make them freely available via a user-friendly web-based interface. These data will allow researchers to better answer a wide range of environmental health questions, such as what population-level factors contribute to the spread of vector-borne disease or where people are particularly vulnerable to food insecurity. The project has four Aims: (1) Ingest population and agricultural census data. Using software developed with NSF funding, data and boundaries for approximately 25,000 additional tables from 250 censuses will be added to the IHGIS database, a ten-fold increase to the current collection. Data from countries most vulnerable to health impacts from climate change and providing the finest geographic detail available will be prioritized. (2) Enable linkages between census data and health data, allowing users to attach community-level census data to individual-level health survey data from the Demographic and Health Surveys, Performance Monitoring for Action surveys, and Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys. The project will also develop a utility to provide geographic unit codes for user-uploaded coordinates, so researchers can link their own health data to IHGIS contextual data. (3) Improve standardization and integration across datasets to support comparisons across time and between countries. Enhancements to the software will enable filtering and selection based on topics and level of geographical detail, standardize units of measurement, and create integrated versions of selected data tables. (4) Support and expand the IHGIS user base through online tutorials, virtual and in-person workshops, webinars, and one-to-one user support to develop a broad community of new and established environmental-health researchers using IHGIS data. Outreach efforts will focus on reaching, training, and supporting a diverse—in background, discipline, and career stage— community of environmental health researchers. By providing rich, detailed, and expansive information on characteristics of populations around the world, IHGIS data will also further the NIEHS goals of developing a program in global environmental health and understanding health disparities and risks for vulnerable populations.