Making an Impact on Climate and Health in LMICs with DHIS2

In three low- and middle-income countries, health officials will start using a free digital toolkit to link local climate data with disease outbreaks and health service planning. This matters because climate change is already shifting patterns of infectious disease, heat stress, and food insecurity, yet most LMICs lack the digital systems to connect environmental monitoring with public health decision-making. Without that link, health ministries cannot predict when malaria season will start, where cholera might emerge after a flood, or which clinics need cooling equipment during a heatwave. If the project succeeds, the three pilot countries will have working climate-health information systems that feed directly into national adaptation plans and health policies. The open-source toolkit will then be available for any country to deploy, potentially standardising how climate and health data are collected, shared, and acted upon globally. This could quietly improve the infrastructure that keeps populations safe—early warning systems, vaccine supply chains, and emergency response logistics—without requiring expensive proprietary software. The research also aims to make local environmental data more accessible to international researchers, filling gaps in global understanding of how climate variation affects human health across different settings.