Global analyses on health effects of temperature and climate change: the contribution of the MCC Network

Abstract

Multi-location analyses have proven to be useful settings for assessing the health impact of environmental hazards at regional and global scales. This study design is being widely applied in climate epidemiology since it allows the quantification of health impacts across highly heterogeneous populations and the identification of vulnerability patterns using a common method. Since 2014, the MCC consortium has developed and applied advanced methodologies to provide robust estimations of mortality impacts of non-optimal temperatures at different spatiotemporal scales in the present time and future climate change scenarios. This was possible thanks to the wide geographical coverage and high statistical power of the data collected. In this work, we aimed to review and summarize findings from published global studies on temperature-related mortality impacts using the MCC dataset. We collected published articles until March 2022 by the MCC Network on health impact assessments of non-optimal temperature and mortality. We included global historical assessments and health impact projections in which heat, cold or both were considered and then combined the estimates by topic and geographical region. Findings from the 20 publications showed good agreement in terms of both spatial and temporal patterns. We found that heat and cold-related risks have decreased over time, and higher vulnerabilities are mostly found in Southeastern regions of Europe and Asia, and in large and highly urbanized cities. Results from the projection studies suggest that heat-related mortality would steeply increase in all regions, and in most of them, this increase would counteract the decrease in cold-related risks leading to a net increase in temperature-mortality under the most pessimistic scenarios. The MCC collaborative research network has greatly contributed to advancing knowledge on the impacts of climate change on health by providing valuable and unique epidemiological evidence on the mortality impacts of non-optimal temperatures. Keywords: climate change, mortality, heat, cold