Through your work, how have you helped SIOs add a climate lens to their data collection practices? What are three key steps they can take in the right direction?

The scarcity of evidence between climate change and important health outcomes hampers countries’ ability to advocate for crucial climate adaptation and mitigation policies, perpetuating a vicious cycle.  

Through the India Climate and Health Data Capacity Accelerator, we are focused on pursuing fellowship opportunities with social impact organizations that exist at the intersection of climate change and health. Collaborating closely with these SIOs, we aim to enhance our understanding of this domain and define effective interventions and policies to tackle climate-related health issues. We do this in the following ways:  

1. Combine institutional knowledge with growing evidence on climate change’s impact in the focus geographies. A useful practice is to establish concrete hypotheses within the context of on-ground work and prioritize areas of research. 
2. Identify the datasets within the organization’s thematic focus and triangulate with available data on factors of climate change (e.g., temperature, precipitation, rainfall, frequency of drought). This integration can happen in a wide variety of problem statements, such as prediction of disease outbreaks, discerning the role of climate-induced migration on mental and reproductive health, etc. 
3. Curate specialized data-centric roles within the SIOs that can work to integrate a climate lens into existing projects. While data science and other data-driven technologies possess significant scalability, climate, and health data represent emerging domains with specialized expertise, often operating in silos. Fostering a talent pipeline tailored to these areas will bolster SIOs’ capacity to address and mitigate climate change-induced health impacts. 

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