Signs of Early Adaptation to Climate Change (EARLY-ADAPT)

Description:

Nearly 8% of deaths are attributable to ambient temperatures, but little is known about the future impact in a warming world. Adaptation strategies have been increasingly implemented in Europe in recent years, but the last IPCC report indicated that evidence of their effectiveness is still lacking. In the last years, adaptation measures started to generate positive benefits for the wellbeing of societies, including an adaptive response to climate change, but the degree to which they are effectively reducing human vulnerability is largely heterogeneous among and within European societies.

The overarching aim of EARLY-ADAPT is to jointly analyse the environmental (climate variability, air pollution, desert dust and infectious diseases) and socioeconomic (macroeconomy, ageing, inequality and gender gap) drivers of recent trends in public health, focusing on human mortality, hospital admissions, occupational accidents and maternal and child health. The driving hypothesis of EARLY-ADAPT is that European societies are starting to adapt to climate change, but the effectiveness of early adaptation is heterogeneous between populations and through time. The project will allow to detect, understand and quantify the drivers and inequalities of human adaptation between countries, regions, cities and social groups.

EARLY-ADAPT will integrate multiple health outcomes and environmental and socioeconomic factors to perform a numerically-intensive, epidemiological analysis between daily spatiotemporal datasets. The project will use different layers of data, and multiscale local regression techniques, to analyse the scales and spatiotemporal heterogeneity of the drivers of early adaptation.

After creating a homogeneous, continental-wide database of human health in Europe, EARLY-ADAPT will model the relationship between health and the environment, and then quantify the modifying effect of the societal factors. Finally, the project will perform a predictability analysis to determine the most realistic adaptation scenarios for the projections of future health.

Project information

Lead

FUNDACION PRIVADA INSTITUTO DE SALUD GLOBAL BARCELONA

Partners

FUNDACION PRIVADA INSTITUTO DE SALUD GLOBAL BARCELONA

Source of funding

This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (Grant agreement No. 865564).