Tracking the impacts of climate change on maternal and child health: the Global Heat Attribution Project (GHAP)

Detection and attribution studies isolate health impacts specific to climate change, spotlighting the growing health, and socio-economic consequences of climate inaction, providing a baseline for long-term monitoring, and marking a step-change in climate change communication.

The three-year GHAP project focuses on measuring heat impacts on maternal and child health by linking climate data with around 45 million birth records from Africa, Europe and Latin America, and upscaling data harmonisation workflows and analysis platforms. Additional data will be sourced throughout.

We will develop a suite of software solutions for streamlining attribution analyses.

We will use statistical approaches, such as trend-to-trend and event attribution analyses, as well as novel machine learning methodology to quantify impacts of increasing temperatures.

Following an indicator-validation protocol, we will select 2-4 indicators to inform sub-national service planning, national resource allocations and global priority setting. We aim to mainstream indicators into global monitoring systems, including the Lancet Countdown.

Lastly, we will model effectiveness of adaptation projects, and integrated adaptation and emissions reduction indicators.

This project marks a fundamental shift in climate change action through its transdisciplinarity, unprecedented geographical coverage and analytical pipelines with actionable outputs from causal inference to policy modelling. CHANCE and GHINN mechanisms facilitate research-to-policy shifts.