Climate Services for Health — Sharing a Common Framework and Experiences

Climate services for health are an emerging technical field with aims to assist health professionals to enhance the public health toolkit by accessing and using relevant and robust climate and weather information. The WMO/WHO Climate Services for Health Case Study Project profiles 40 country based programmatic examples to better explain what, how, and why health-tailored climate services can support the optimal design of health solutions – and ultimately health systems – that are more responsive and resilient to climate risks.

This collection of pioneering experiences in applied climate and health science demonstrates that opportunities, expertise, techniques and good practice already exist to enable climate-informed health decision-making. Today, health practitioners, researchers, policy-makers and individual citizens have greater access than ever to relevant and real-time information about hazardous conditions. By learning how to harness climate knowledge for strategic and routine health decision-making, the case studies show how climate services can provide critical insights to anticipate problems, better target health service interventions and encourage protective behaviors. A range of examples of how climate services have assisted health partners to save lives, treat more cases, and reduced disease burdens and and costs in health service delivery will be shared.

The presentation will focus on describing a six component framework, based on the common experiences and challenges described in the case studies. This tool can be used to guide future experiences and facilitate success to co-produce and use effectives and sustainable climate services for health.