Associated organisationsBorlaug Institute for South Asia · Centre Suisse de Recherches Scientifiques - Cote D'ivoire · Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin · International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis · Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research · Rwanda Meteorology Agency · Spatial Informatics Group · University of California San Diego · University of EdinburghEurope PMC affiliations are not treated as award recipients or mapped locations.
Funding£3.0M
PeriodSept 2024 — Sept 2027
In plain English
AI plain-English summary
Climate change is already stunting children’s growth and weakening their immune systems, but the tools to prove it in courtrooms and policy debates barely exist for the poorest countries. Current attribution science—which links extreme weather to climate change—focuses almost entirely on heatwaves and adult deaths in wealthy nations. It ignores the slow, invisible damage that shifting rainfall and crop failures inflict on children’s nutrition in low- and middle-income countries. This project fills that gap by building the data and methods needed to quantify how climate change has already harmed child health. The team will combine climate datasets, crop models, and health statistics into an open-source digital tool called MILK. Co-designed with scientists and policymakers in West Africa, East Africa, and South Asia, MILK will produce legally and politically usable evidence. If successful, it could transform how governments and international bodies allocate adaptation funds, design safety nets, and hold polluters accountable—not for future risks, but for damage already done to children alive today.
View original technical description
Children in low- and middle-income countries are among those most at risk to the health impacts of climate change, not least through undernutrition, which has serious long-lasting consequences for individuals and society and may undermine decades of global health gains. Attribution science can drive urgent societal action. However, it is currently limited in scope, focusing mostly on heat and adult populations in high-income settings, largely because of the lack of accessible tools, methods, data, and interdisciplinary expertise. To fill this research gap, this project will derive multiple climate attribution datasets, advance process-based crop models, and apply econometric, epidemiological and health impact assessment methods on underused data sources in order to quantify the already occurring impacts of climate change on child health. These will be integrated into an interactive digital open source tool (MILK). MILK will be co-designed in a series of workshops with the interdisciplinary project team and scientists and stakeholders from West Africa, Central/Eastern Africa, and South Asia. The attribution results will be set into the context of mitigation and adaptation options and complemented with an intergenerational justice perspective.The involvement of policy makers will be ensured throughout the project to advance the policy integration of the generated evidence.
Attriverse: Developing Digital Solutions for Health Impact Attribution
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