WHO Academy online course
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Enhanced health decision-making using climate information
A foundational course on using climate information for public health surveillance, early warning, and adaptation planning
Resources
PowerPoint version
Email healthclimate@who.int to request the full course PowerPoint.
Overview
As awareness of climate-related health risks grows, countries are seeking to strengthen prevention, preparedness, and response. Rising temperatures, changing rainfall, more frequent extreme events, and shifts in humidity and air quality are altering the geography, seasonality, and intensity of climate-sensitive health risks, such as vector-borne disease outbreaks, heat-related illness, water-related diseases, and undernutrition.
Responding to these challenges requires a set of skills that has not traditionally been part of public health training. Health professionals are often not trained to interpret climate and weather information or are unaware of how climate information can be used to make better health decisions. At the same time, ministries of health are increasingly expected to integrate climate considerations into national strategies, including Vulnerability and Adaptation (V&A) assessments and Health National Adaptation Plans (HNAPs).
This course was developed to help address this gap. It provides the foundational knowledge needed for health professionals to engage effectively with meteorologists and climate scientists: speaking the same language, asking the right questions, co-producing tools such as early warning systems and risk assessments, ensuring those tools are methodologically sound, and translating climate information into actionable health decisions. The course is structured as a progression: from basic climate and epidemiological literacy to the integration of climate and health data through modelling, to the use of climate information in operational tools such as climate-informed surveillance and early warning systems, and finally to the practical and institutional considerations that shape successful implementation.
The course is intended for Ministry of Health staff and public health professionals working in epidemiology, disease surveillance, disease and vector prevention and control, environmental health, and related fields, as well as professionals working in the climate and health field, including researchers and students. It assumes no prior background in climate science. Together with the wider learning package, this course supports the goals of WHO's work on supporting countries in building climate-resilient, low-carbon, sustainable health systems and contributes to building a workforce equipped to use climate information in the service of better health outcomes.
The technical content of the module has been developed by:
Part 1: Hyun Kim (WHO), Joy Shumake-Guillemot (WMO/WHO Joint Office), Juli Trtanj (NOAA) and Hunter Jones (NOAA)
Part 2: Sadie Ryan (University of Florida), Joacim Rocklöv (Umeå University, University of Heidelberg), Nick Odgen (Public Health Agency of Canada), Felipe J Colón-González, Simon Hales
Part 3: Jan Semenza (Umeå University), Catherine A. Lippi and Sadie Ryan (University of Florida), Joacim Rocklöv (Umeå University, University of Heidelberg), Yoonhee Kim (University of Tokyo) and Ho Kim (Seoul National University)
Part 4: Hyun Kim (WHO), Rachel Lowe (LSHTM), Lawrence Kazembe
Part 5: Laith Hussain-Alkhateeb (University of Gothenburg), Hyun Kim (WHO), Avriel Díaz and Anna Stewart-Ibarra (Inter-American Institute for Global Change Research)
Overview
Climate services for health refer to “the entire iterative process of joint collaboration between relevant multidisciplinary partners to identify, generate, and build capacity to access, develop, deliver, and use relevant and reliable climate knowledge to enhance health decisions”. In simple terms, they describe how health and climate experts collaborate to translate climate information into actionable guidance that supports better health decisions and strengthens resilience.
This first part of the course introduces the climate concepts that underpin the rest of the course. It provides learners with a basic understanding of weather data, climate information, and core elements of climate science, establishing the foundation for engagement with the more applied sections that follow.
Learning objectives
By the end of Part 1, you should be able to:
- distinguish between weather, climate variability, and climate change, and identify the four climate variables most relevant to health;
- differentiate the main types of climate information products (observations, forecasts across timescales, and projections) and match them to appropriate decision timeframes;
- explain why uncertainty is inherent in forecasts and projections, and what ensemble forecasting and scenarios (RCPs and SSPs) are designed to address;
- identify entry points where climate information can inform public health decisions, with concrete examples across timescales
Overview
Epidemiology provides the language and methods used across public health to describe who gets sick, when, where, and why. In climate and health work, those same methods are applied to questions in which exposure varies across space and time with weather and climate, and where the health outcomes of interest are often climate-sensitive.
This part of the course reviews the epidemiological concepts that recur throughout climate-health work. It focuses on the elements of study design, data, and visualization that learners will encounter when climate variables are incorporated into an analysis, providing a shared foundation for the more applied parts that follow.
Learning objectives
By the end of Part 2, you should be able to:
- define core epidemiological terms relevant to climate and health, including case definitions, incidence, prevalence, and transmission;
- compare the study designs commonly used in climate epidemiology and the questions each is best suited to answer;
- outline the main types of health, entomological, and environmental data and weigh their strengths and limitations;
- interpret basic spatial and temporal visualizations of climate and health indicators;
- locate relevant open-access datasets and recognize the analytical software typically used in climate-health work.
Overview
Quantifying how climate influences health requires integrating climate and health data into a single analytical framework. The hazard, exposure, vulnerability, and risk approach offers one such structure, and a range of analytical methods, drawn from attribution science, spatial analysis, mechanistic modelling, and time-series epidemiology, have been developed to link climate variables to health outcomes.
This part of the course introduces these concepts and methods. It is intended to give learners a sense of how climate-health relationships are studied in practice and how the resulting evidence supports broader efforts such as Vulnerability and Adaptation (V&A) assessments.
Learning objectives
By the end of Part 3, you should be able to:
- apply the hazard, exposure, vulnerability, and risk framework to climate-health questions;
- compare the main analytical approaches used to link climate to health, including attribution, spatial, process-based, and time-series methods, and recognize the kinds of questions each is suited to;
- interpret an exposure-outcome response function and what it conveys about climate-health relationships;
- explain how these methods contribute to quantifying climate impacts on health, including in support of V&A assessments.
Overview
Climate information becomes most valuable to public health when it is built into the tools that support day-to-day and longer-term decisions. Climate-informed surveillance and early warning systems for conditions such as malaria, dengue, and heat-related illness, together with risk maps, dashboards, and projections of future health burdens, translate climate-health science into products that ministries of health and other actors can use.
This part of the course examines how these tools work in practice and how their usefulness is evaluated. It connects the analytical methods covered earlier in the course to the operational settings in which they are applied.
Learning objectives
By the end of Part 4, you should be able to:
- explain how climate-informed surveillance and early warning systems are used for climate-sensitive conditions, including malaria, dengue, and heat-related illness;
- interpret how risk maps and dashboards communicate climate-related health risks to decision-makers and the public;
- outline how methods from earlier parts of the course are applied to estimate future health burdens under different climate scenarios;
- identify the criteria used to evaluate whether a climate-informed early warning system is useful and fit for purpose.
Overview
Climate-informed health work succeeds or fails on a set of considerations that sit outside the science itself: how programmes are designed, who is involved in shaping them, how partnerships across the climate and health sectors are sustained, and how risks are communicated to the people who need to act on them.
This part of the course addresses these practical and institutional dimensions of implementation, drawing on case examples of climate-informed early warning systems for heat and for climate-sensitive infectious diseases.
Learning objectives
By the end of Part 5, you should be able to:
- explain how logic models and co-creation shape the design of climate-informed health programmes;
- identify the partners across the climate and health sectors whose collaboration supports climate-informed health work;
- apply basic principles of effective risk communication to climate-health messages and products;
- draw on case examples of climate-informed early warning systems for heat and for climate-sensitive infectious diseases to inform implementation in other settings.