The HARMONIZE project, coordinated by the new Global Health Resilience Team of the Earth Sciences Department at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center-Centro Nacional de Supercomputación (BSC-CNS), has been officially launched. The Wellcome Trust funded project aims to better understand the link between climate change and the increasing risk in the incidence of mosquito-borne diseases, such as dengue, chikungunya and Zika, in the Latin America & the Caribbean (LAC) region, where their burden is greater than anywhere else in the world.

The LAC region is facing an increasingly complex health risk landscape. Warming temperatures due to climate change and extreme events such as intense droughts and heavy rainfall have implications for the timing and intensity of mosquito-borne and waterborne disease outbreaks. Added to environmental degradation and socio-economic inequalities, the situation has resulted in explosive epidemics of dengue and other climate-sensitive infectious diseases.

We currently lack the scientific knowledge needed to understand and predict the diverse impacts of extreme events and landscape changes on disease risk, leaving local communities in climate change hotspots vulnerable to increasing health threats. Regional agencies and national governments must also be informed about climate trends and the effect of extreme events in order to prepare adaptation plans and design health policies. This lack is partially due to a need for empirical evidence describing environmental change in remote and under-resourced areas, as well as a lack of trained research software engineers and data scientists.

HARMONIZE aims to develop cost-effective and reproducible digital infrastructure for stakeholders in climate change hotspots in Latin America & the Caribbean, including cities, small islands, highlands, and the Amazon rainforest. The project will gather, organise and post-process climate, environmental, socio-economic and health data coming from different sources, as well as collect new ground data using drone technology and low-cost weather sensors in areas most relevant for disease transmission.

“By gathering disparate multi-source and multi-scale data to a resolution most useful for public health decision making, we can devise computational models to detect associations between climatic and environmental factors and disease risk and use these to predict when and where disease outbreaks and disease emergence are most likely to occur,” said ICREA professor Rachel Lowe and leader of the Global Health Resilience Team. 

The main challenge of HARMONIZE is to create digital toolkits that meet the needs of local communities in climate change hotspots. This will allow local users to understand the links between environmental change and infectious disease risk in their own context, and build robust early warning and response systems in low-resource settings.

“We hope that by gathering new and existing data to help understand, monitor, and predict the impacts of climate change and environmental degradation on infectious disease risk will increase adaptive capacity and resilience of local communities to the harmful effects of climate change,” added Prof Lowe.