AI for the Health and Climate Change Nexus

Climate Action to Advance Healthy Societies in Europe (CATALYSE) is a Horizon Europe funded project that seeks to provide new knowledge, data and tools to close the knowledge-to-action gap to accelerate climate change action and protect public health in Europe. Within CATALYSE, we research how key stakeholders – such as policymakers, the health community, and the general public – engage with evidence on the health dimensions of climate change, and the implications of this engagement for knowledge translation. This involves producing case studies of policy processes related to health and climate change, examining the effects of framing of climate change and health messages to increase stakeholder engagement (using survey experiments and other methods), and more broadly speaking to different stakeholders to gain a better understanding of how different actors engage with evidence, and what this means for how the CATALYSE translates and presents the evidence generated. 

It’s important because there is growing recognition that generating new evidence on different aspects of the climate change-health relationship – and even producing great research on the impacts different policies might have – doesn’t automatically lead to change. It is increasingly clear that we need a better understanding of actual political and policy processes to understand how new evidence can inform actual decision-making and policies on mitigation and adaptation. 

There is often an implicit assumption with scientific research that producing new evidence will automatically lead to policy changes. However, we know that often that’s not the case – decision-makers often face competing demands; there may be political pressures, interests, and obstacles that prevent changes being made; or it might be that there are technical or financial barriers to implementing specific measures. All of this requires a greater understanding of the policy process and the types of evidence that may be useful at different stages of this process in driving change. As well as better understanding policy and political processes, this also requires an understanding of how to communicate scientific research and evidence in ways that build support among key actors, such as policymakers, the health community, and the wider public.

Despite clear signs that the impacts of climate change are escalating, the global response has been inadequate. Traditional scientific efforts have fallen short of providing knowledge and tools that have been broadly applied in decision-making, and innovative approaches to knowledge translation are needed. To catalyse climate action in Europe to protect public health, we need new knowledge, data, and tools on the relationships between changes in environmental hazards caused by climate change, ecosystems, and human health; the health co-benefits of climate action; the role of health evidence in decision making; and the societal implications of climate change for health systems. 

The effectiveness of adaptation strategies and monitoring of mitigation can be improved through innovative surveillance and forecasting tools. There is a need for innovative tools to identify, monitor, forecast and predict impacts of climate change induced environmental hazards on human health. Bottom-up, citizen-generated data can shed unique light on perceptions regarding health implications of climate change and the social acceptability of mitigation actions. Within CATALYSE, this project develops an innovative surveillance tool to monitor perceived attribution of health and wellbeing to climate change induced hazards. 

In order to understand perceived attribution, we are building models that identify causal relationships in language. Causality is central to human reasoning and decision-making processes. By analysing and comprehending causal relationships expressed in language, we can gain deeper insights into the underlying thought processes and motivations behind actions, policies, and arguments. Additionally, understanding causal language can help improve communication strategies by enabling more persuasive and clear communication of cause-and-effect relationships. This can be particularly important in the climate change and health discourse, where effective communication of policy rationales can influence public opinion and support for specific policies.