The UK Climate Resilience Programme ran from 2019 to 2023

Addressing the resilience needs of the UK health sector: climate service pilots

This project aims to establish and characterise the extreme weather events linked to ill-health in the UK and to quantify how both climate and demographic changes might result in changing needs for resilience in the health and social care sector in future decades.

This project is one of the climate service prototypes being developed under the Climate Service Pilots work-package led by the UK Met Office.

Objectives

This project will consist of two principle tasks. First, it will analyse existing observational and model simulation datasets along with mortality data to better understand the links between mortality and climate variability and change.  Secondly, it will zoom in on specific cities to understand how finer scale simulations can help to understand the weather and climate drivers of health impacts using an existing and well-supported urban surface model (SUEWS) and the collation and combination of other datasets that characterise vulnerability and exposure to extreme weather events.

Project team

The team brings together meteorologists with experience in large-scale and urban climate dynamics with epidemiologists and those with experience of sustainable and built environments. The project team will work closely with Met Office scientists leveraging the existing working relationships to ensure that the service is of benefit to end-users.

Outputs
  • Developing climate services for the health sector (PDF summary)
  •  Demonstration of a climate service to address the resilience needs of the UK health sector (PDF summary)
  • Data for this project is available here
  • Webinar, 7 October 2020: Understanding heat related mortality with Andrew Charlton-Perez (University of Reading) and Mark Harrison (Met Office).