Climate change : quantifying the health impact at national and local levels

The disease burden of a population, and how that burden is distributed, are important pieces of information for prioritizing and defining strategies to protect population health. For policy-makers, disease burden estimates provide an indication of the current and future health gains that could be achieved by targeted protection from specific risks. To help provide a reliable source of information for policy-makers, WHO has developed methods to analyse the impacts of risks for health, and has estimated the impacts of 26 risk factors worldwide, including climate change.

The Environmental Burden of Disease (EBD) series aims at supporting countries to generate reliable information for policy-making, by presenting methods for estimating the environmental burden at national and regional levels. The introductory volume in the series outlines the general method, while subsequent volumes address specific environmental risk factors. The guides on specific risk factors are organized similarly, first outlining the evidence linking the risk factor to health, and then describing a method for estimating the health impact of that risk factor on the population. All the guides take a practical, step-by-step approach and use numerical examples. The methods described can be adapted both to regional and national levels, and can be tailored to suit data availability.