Approved Research

Investigating the role of early climate exposure on health and wellbeing across the lifecourse using Met Office derived climate exposures.

Lay summary

Climate change will continue to increase the likelihood of extreme weather events such as heatwaves in coming years. A lot of research has focused on the immediate health costs of such heatwaves, such as deaths directly following the heatwave event. This is likely to understate the actual health impact of such events, as it ignores longer-term health impacts of these events. In order to understand this we must develop a statistical framework for looking at longer-term health effects of our proposed health mechanism. We will use Met office linked data to look at participants' climate exposure in early life, and look at how this associates with later life outcomes.

Several methods exist to answer such questions, each of which with different strengths and weaknesses. By combining multiple designs, we can assess the consistency of our findings and generate greater confidence in our results. Our proposed research will outline how climate-focused analyses can be carried out using large-scale datasets such as UK Biobank to help understand future health consequences, and develop recommendations for the use of climate variables in future projects.