NIH CHORDS: Building a Climate, Environment, and Health Data Ecosystem to Advance Climate Change and Health Research

Addressing the health risks from climate change and related disasters requires timely, accessible, harmonized, and interoperable data from multiple disciplines. Under the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Climate Change and Health Initiative (CCHI), the Climate and Health Outcomes Research Data Systems (CHORDS) project aims to develop data resources and tools to advance research on the impacts of climate change and related disasters on human health. This transdisciplinary project is building a data ecosystem of tools and training materials to enable health researchers, public health practitioners, and others to assess climate-related health impacts, evaluate interventions, and respond to growing community health risks. The project has five main objectives: 1) to build a catalog of data related to climate and health with a focus on wildfires; 2) to develop standardized, linked climate, health, and demographic datasets; 3) to provide tools and guides to help researchers connect health and climate data; 4) to develop a use case study on the effects of wildfires on human health; and 5) to address stakeholder feedback to ensure user needs are met. This presentation will introduce the new CHORDS Platform (https://niehs.github.io/chords_landing/index.html), a free, online data catalog of climate, environment, sociodemographic, and health data resources, and provide an overview of glossaries, tutorials, and other available data analysis products. Through CHORDS and other CCHI investments across the nation, NIH aims to improve understanding of effective public health actions for the harmful effects of climate change and climate-related disasters on health.