Climate change is one of several drivers of recurrent outbreaks and geographical range expansion of zoonotic infectious diseases in Europe. Policy and decision-makers need tailored monitoring of climate-induced disease risk, and decision support tools for timely early warning and impact assessment for proactive preparedness and timely responses.
The abundance of open data in Europe allows the establishment of more effective, accessible, and cost-beneficial prevention and control responses. IDAlert will co-create novel policy-relevant pan-European indicators that track past, present, and future climate-induced disease risk across hazard, exposure, and vulnerability domains at the animal, human and environment interface. Indicators will be sub-national and disaggregated through an inequality lens. We will generate tools to assess cost-benefit of climate change adaptation and mitigation measures across sectors and scales, to reveal novel policy entry points and opportunities. Surveillance, early warning and response systems will be co-created and prototyped to increase health system resilience at regional and local levels, and explicitly reduce socio-economic inequality.
Indicators and tools will be co-produced through multilevel engagement, innovative methodologies, existing and new data streams and citizen science, taking advantage of intelligence generated from selected hotspots in Spain, Greece, The Netherlands, Sweden, and Bangladesh that are experiencing rapid urban transformation and heterogeneous climate-induced disease threats. For implementation, IDAlert has assembled European authorities in climate modelling, infectious disease epidemiology, social sciences, environmental economics, One Health and EcoHealth. Further, by engaging critical stakeholders from the start, IDAlert will ensure long-lasting impacts on EU climate policy, and provide new evidence and tools for the European Green Deal to strengthen population health resilience to climate change.

General Objectives

Emergence and transmission of pathogens that cause infectious diseases is an increasing problem in Europe, fuelled by the upward trends of key drivers associated with global environmental change, including anthropogenic climate change, travel and tourism, trade, but also antimicrobial resistance, food safety, and societal and environmental transformations. To address these new and evolving challenges, a paradigm shift is required, in which animal, human, and environmental change interactions are addressed from an EcoHealth and One Health systems perspective.
IDAlert project aspires to overcome existing disciplinary divides by integrating climate change, EcoHealth and One Health perspectives to tackle the emergence and transmission of pathogens and spread of zoonotic pathogens.

Expected Results

IDAlert aims at the following outcomes:

1. Development of innovative indicators and monitoring mechanisms to assess the health-relevant outcomes of climate policies and actions
2. Development of predictive models and early warning systems for exposure and health impacts of climate change based on transparent assumptions and architecture
3. Development of tools for health impact and cost-benefit assessment of climate- change adaptation and mitigation measures
4. Investigation of health co-benefits and unintended consequences of climate adaptation and mitigation policies
5. Demonstration of the validity of tools and methods in policy-relevant case studies
6. Determination of the societal implications of climate change on health systems, including occupational health, and development of adaptation measures
7. Development of training materials and guidelines to educate relevant actors in citizens’ daily life on climate change health impacts and to facilitate adaptation of health systems and practices
8. Delivery of FAIR data on positive and negative health impacts of climate change, including impact on groups at higher risk or vulnerability