The attribution of human health outcomes to climate change: transdisciplinary practical guidance

Abstract

For over 30 years, detection and attribution (D&A) studies have informed key conclusions in international and national assessments of climate science, providing compelling evidence for the reality and seriousness of anthropogenic effects on the global climate. In the early twenty-first century, D&A methods were adapted to assess the contribution of climate change to longer-term trends in earth system processes and extreme weather events. More recently, attribution research quantified the health and economic impacts of climate change. Here we provide practical guidance to inform transdisciplinary collaboration among health, climate, and other relevant scientific disciplines and interested parties in designing, conducting, interpreting, and reporting robust and policy-relevant attribution analyses of human health outcomes. This guidance resulted from discussions among experts in health and climate science. Recommended steps include co-developing the research questions across disciplines; establishing a transdisciplinary analytic team with fundamental grounding in the core disciplines; engaging meaningfully with relevant interested parties and decision-makers to define an appropriate study design and analytic process, including defining the exposure event or trend; identifying, visualizing, and describing linkages in the causal pathway from exposure to weather/climate variables to the health outcome(s) of interest; choosing appropriate counterfactual climate data, and where applicable, to evaluate the skill of the climate and health impact model(s) used in D&A research; quantifying the attributable changes in climate variables; quantifying the attributable health impacts within the context of other determinants of exposure and vulnerability; and reporting key results, including a description of how recommendations were incorporated into the analytical plan. Implementation of guidance would benefit diverse interested parties including researchers, research funders, policymakers, and climate litigation by harmonizing methods and increasing confidence in findings.