Investigators: Dann Mitchell (Geographical Sciences), Paul Valdes (Geographical Sciences), Richard Morris (School of Social and Community Medicine), Alice Venn (Faculty of Social Sciences and Law)

This project was funded by the Cabot Institute Innovation Fund to the value of £3439

Project descriptor: 

Our central research question, and ultimate goal is “to understand how changes in heat stress lead to human mortality in cities across the globe”. Heat stress – mortality relationships need to be calculated at the city level, but ultimately a global number of deaths is the knowledge that many communities want, specifically to show just how large this climate change impact can be from a legal (Loss and Damage) perspective. The World Health Organisation (WMO) have highly uncertain estimates for this number, mainly because they base everything on first world cities (namely in the USA and Europe), and then extrapolate.

While addressing our research goal requires a large consortium of experts in multiple fields, an essential first step is to set up a statistical model to link heat stress with the number of deaths over a range of different cities. Such models have been developed by existing collaborators of Dr Mitchell, but are complex, and therefore require research time to properly set up, test, and make accessible. It is intended that with such a model, the named team can develop pilot studies of how city-level mortality will change under past and future climate change. The climate-health topic is a key focus of many major research councils/initiatives at the moment, and therefore the time is right to pave the way for much large future research bids through this project.