These pages within the Environment, Health and Development Network website have been established with support from the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research. The aim is to start with an initial set of resources and progressively build the components and functions of the site, drawing on your inputs and ideas – please see the Contact Us page on the main Network website for details of how to get in touch.

Climate and health are intricately connected. Weather patterns, seasonal cycles, extreme events and long-term climatic trends have direct effects on human health, but they also have manifold indirect effects on the resources that support human health and on the diseases and other hazards that undermine it. The links between climate and health have been thrown into especially sharp relief by the ongoing threats posed by climate change. In 2009, in the run-up to COP-15 in Copenhagen, a number of international initiatives were set in motion to highlight these linkages, among them the World Medical Association’s Declaration of Delhi on Health and Climate Change and a series of reports from the World Health Organization including the document Protecting Health from Climate Change: Connecting Science, Policy and People. Health issues also achieved prominence at COP-16 in Cancun in 2010, where a Cancun Climate and Health Statement was provided to negotiators on behalf of the health community, highlighting health concerns of climate change. In 2011 at COP-17 in Durban, health was identified as an adaptation priority, and a series of events highlighted aspects of health and climate.  These included the Durban Declaration, which calls upon climate negotiators to rapidly advance climate mitigation policy measures, while also supporting health-oriented adaptation actions.

The anticipated health effects of climate change are global in scope but their impacts will almost certainly fall most heavily on the poorer populations of the world. In common with the broader Environment, Health and Development Network the focus of these pages is on research relating to developing countries. It is in such contexts that we feel there is the greatest need to foster cross-disciplinary research on the linkages between health and climate, including analysis of health impacts, vulnerability and response. We hope that the pages will act both as a resource and as a stimulus for academic and applied work in this field that places the needs of the poor at its centre. 

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