Drivers, patterns and health consequences of mobility responses - building a simulation tool for anticipatory climate action

• Applicant: Dr. Joacim Rocklöv
• Subject Area: Public Health, Healthcare Research, Social and Occupational Medicine
• Term: since 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 409670289

Climate change is associated with risks to human life, health, and prosperity and can lead to mobility responses, such as short-term or long-term movements, mobility, displacement and migration, for example, in relation to floods, temperature extremes, and severe droughts impacting on water and food security. The overall objective of P8 is to generate new knowledge on the drivers, patterns and health impacts of mobility responses in relation to climate and weather variability in Sub-Saharan Africa, and to build a tool for anticipatory climate action which can help guide interventions seeking to reduce negative health impacts from mobility responses. The work will be based on local data from two HDSS sites in Kenya and Burkina Faso from CP1 and P4. Specifically, our objectives are to: 1.) Perform machine learning methods to identify key drivers of mobility responses in relation to climate variability and weather in the context of other non-climate drivers. 2) Conduct epidemiological analyses on the relationship between different types of mobility responses and health outcomes, such as mortality, morbidity, health seeking behaviour, anthropometrics and social health determinants based on the HDSS data. 3.) Develop an agent-based model using the insights and parameters from the machine learning model in (1) and the epidemiological models in (2) for simulating the impacts of climate variability and weather on mobility response and health impacts in the HDSS populations. 4.) Develop a user-tool for informing humanitarian anticipatory action in relation to climate induced mobility responses and health impacts based on the agent-based simulation model from (3).

• DFG Programme: Research Units
• Subproject of: FOR 2936: Climate Change and Health in Sub-Saharan Africa