Current and future temperature-related mortality and morbidity in the UK: a public health and climate change perspective

一些科学研究表明，暴露在极端室外温度下会增加死亡和发病的风险。随着越来越多的证据表明，气候变化将增加极端天气事件的频率和强度，从而导致相关的健康影响，在过去几年里，人们对这一风险因素的兴趣大大增加。各国政府和国际卫生组织正面临压力，要求它们做出回应，主要是通过实施有效的公共卫生和气候政策，这些政策必须以坚实的科学评估为基础。然而，我们对非最佳温度如何影响人类健康，以及这些风险将如何在变暖的地球上发生变化的了解仍然有限。该项目将通过对英格兰和威尔士非最佳室外温度和气候变化相关的当前和未来健康风险进行全面评估，来弥补这些差距。研究提案由四个工作包(WPS)组成的详细计划构成。在第一个WP中，研究小组将把全国范围的健康数据库与高分辨率的环境措施联系起来，然后将应用先进的流行病学方法来研究暴露在高温和寒冷中如何增加死亡和住院的风险。评估将扩展到WP2，以通过元回归和机器学习方法评估风险如何在小的地理区域和时间上变化，并根据背景特征，如当地气候、社会经济条件、基础设施和城市环境，确定人口的不同脆弱性水平。这些信息将在WP3中用来量化过去35年小区域水平的超额死亡率和发病率，然后预测未来情景下的健康影响，这些情景涉及几个变化，例如全球变暖的趋势、社会经济路径和潜在的公共卫生政策。最后一个WP将创建储存库来存储项目的全套结果，并将开发易于使用的Web工具来提取、汇总、显示和绘制风险衡量标准，并执行情景模拟。这些资源将免费以开放获取的形式发布，并将提供给包括科学家、公共卫生专家、记者和普通公众在内的广泛用户。该项目将提供与炎热和寒冷相关的健康风险的详细图景，并将帮助确定英格兰和威尔士人口中脆弱性和弹性的驱动因素。这些信息对于对与气候和公共卫生政策有关的潜在惠益进行循证量化，以及比较减轻和适应全球变暖在国家和国际层面造成的健康负担的替代缓解和适应战略至关重要。

Several scientific studies have demonstrated that exposure to extreme outdoor temperatures increases the risk of mortality and morbidity. The interest in this risk factor has grown considerably in the last few years, with the mounting evidence that climate change will increase the frequency and intensity of extreme weather episodes, and consequently the associated health impacts. Governments and international health organisations are under pressure to respond, primarily through the implementation of effective public health and climate policies, which must be based on solid scientific assessments. However, our knowledge on how non-optimal temperature affect human health, and how these risks will change in a warming planet, is still limited. This project will address these gaps by offering a comprehensive assessment of current and future health risks associated to non-optimal outdoor temperature and climate change in the England and Wales. The research proposal is structured in a detailed plan of four work packages (WPs). In the first WP, the research team will link country-wide health databases with high-resolution environmental measures, and will then apply advanced epidemiological methods to study how exposure to heat and cold increase the risk of mortality and hospital admissions. The evaluation will be extended in WP2 to assess through meta-regression and machine learning methods how the risk varies across small geographical areas and time, and to define differential vulnerability levels of the population in terms of contextual characteristics, such as local climate, socio-economic conditions, infrastructure, and urban settings. This information will be used in WP3 to quantify excess mortality and morbidity at small-area level in the last 35 years, and then to project health impacts under future scenarios that account for several changes, such as trends in global warming, socio-economic pathways, and potential public health policies. The last WP will create repositories to store the full set of results from the project, and will develop easy-to-use web tools to extract, summarise, display, and map risk measures, and to perform scenario simulations. These resources will be released for free and in open-access form, and will be made available to a broad range of users including scientists, public health experts, journalists, and the general public.The project will provide a detailed picture of health risks associated to heat and cold, and will help identify drivers of vulnerability and resilience within the population of England and Wales. This information is critical to perform an evidence-based quantification of potential benefits related to climate and public health policies, and to compare alternative mitigation and adaptation strategies to reduce the health burden of global warming at national and international level.