Palmeiro Silva, Yasna Karina; (2024) Population health indicators of climate change impacts and estimation of health outcomes under RCP2.6 and RCP8.5 up to 2090, in Chile. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

Text Thesis_YKPS_24Jan2024_clean.pdf - Accepted Version Access restricted to UCL open access staff until 1 February 2025. Download (65MB)

Abstract

Although there is growing evidence on the effects of climate change on population health, important gaps remain as these effects are largely local and evidence mainly comes from particular countries. In Chile, global data cannot be fully applied given its diverse climates and population characteristics. Therefore, this thesis aims to contribute by proposing indicators of the impacts of climate change on population health that can be integrated into public health surveillance, and evaluating the potential impacts of climate change on population health in Chile. The methods cover two main approaches. Firstly, a systematic review and a suitability analysis were performed to evaluate indicators for integration into Chilean public health surveillance systems. Secondly, historical exposure-response functions for climate indices and health outcomes were estimated using Negative Binomial Generalised Linear Models, which were then applied to projected climate indices under different climate scenarios. Estimates by region, age categories, and gender were obtained for all-cause and cardiovascular and temperature-related (CVT) deaths and hospitalisations. The suggested high-priority indicators included incidence and mortality of vector-, food-, and water-borne diseases, and temperature-related health outcomes, which can be easily integrated into current surveillance systems. Regarding the potential effects of climate change on population health, it seems that all-cause deaths and CVT deaths and hospitalisations are sensitive to a decrease in low temperature climate indices, and all-cause hospitalisations are sensitive to an increase in high temperature climate indices. Overall, in northern regions, deaths and hospitalisations increase; in central and central-southern regions, health outcomes increase in summer and decrease in winter; and in austral regions, there is an overall decrease in all health outcomes. The findings expand previous existing evidence on the topic in Chile, and open several other areas to explore, such as local analyses and the refinement of estimates by causes of deaths or hospitalisations.

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