Co-designing a locally informed climate-health surveillance platform in Uganda

This project co-designs a locally informed surveillance platform to track and respond to the health impacts of extreme weather in Uganda. Communities along Lake Victoria in the Rakai region are experiencing increased flooding and rising water levels, and the collaboration builds on three decades of infrastructure the Rakai Health and Sciences Program developed for HIV surveillance. Working with community members, the team modifies the existing sampling scheme to capture social, geographic and seasonal variation in exposure to climate stressors, aligns surveys with established data repositories, creates new climate and health survey modules, and incorporates local climate stations and remotely sensed data. Michigan expertise in epidemiology, climate science and environmental sustainability joins Ugandan leadership to build a rich data resource that measures vulnerability and adaptive capacity, engages policymakers, and seeds larger-scale climate and health research.