Policy relevant future scenarios of population health and health systems

Climate modellers currently lack standardised inputs for projecting how climate change will reshape human health and health systems. This project will extend the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs)—the same scenarios used to study climate impacts on economies and emissions—to give health researchers a consistent toolkit of narratives and quantitative data. The team will produce health-sector-specific descriptions of future population health, health system capacity, demographic shifts, and adaptation strategies under different climate and development trajectories. An initial workshop will define the exact work packages and author teams. The results will be freely available through an online explorer, webinars, and publications, alongside a guidance document on best practices for projecting health risks from local to international scales. If successful, this work will replace the current patchwork of ad-hoc assumptions with standardised, policy-relevant inputs. That could improve the reliability of projections used by governments and international agencies to plan healthcare infrastructure, allocate resources for disease prevention, and anticipate the health burdens of a warming world—decisions that quietly shape everything from hospital budgets to vaccination campaigns.