AFRIVERSE: Building African climate-health attribution data, digital tools and capacity

Africa has been largely left out of studies that link climate change to human health, and AFRIVERSE aims to close that gap by building the data, digital tools, and expertise needed to run those analyses on the continent. The problem is stark: low funding, scarce digital health and climate data, and a shortage of trained researchers mean that when heatwaves or disease outbreaks hit Africa, scientists cannot easily determine how much climate change contributed. Without that evidence, governments and health agencies struggle to plan effectively. AFRIVERSE directly tackles this by creating bias-corrected climate model data, new health datasets, and an interactive digital platform that makes both accessible. It also runs a summer school for early-career African researchers and funds several attribution studies—on heat-related illness, hospital admissions for heart and lung conditions, and non-communicable disease indicators—led by African teams at the University of Cape Town’s new ASCEND centre. If successful, the project could shift how climate-health evidence is produced and used in Africa. Policy makers, public health officials, and disaster response planners would gain the concrete, locally relevant data they currently lack—data that quietly underpins decisions about hospital capacity, heatwave warnings, and long-term infrastructure planning.