ClimaCare project informs UK Government solution to climate health target

The report to parliament sets out the government's response to the Climate Change Committee's report and their recommendations on adaptation.

The paper states that the UK Government Department of Health and Social Care are linked with IEDE Prof Mike Davies and the ClimaCare project to support the assessment of health sector vulnerability to existing and future climate risks, particularly for care homes and home-based care.

ClimaCare (Governing the Climate Adaptation of Care Settings) is a 28-month project led by Prof Mike Davies at UCL with research collaborators from Oxford Brookes University and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, and funded by UKRI.

ClimaCare will enable the UK’s care provision to develop adaptation pathways to rising heat stress under climate change. The project will quantify climate related heat risks in care settings nationwide to enhance understanding of human behaviour, organisational capacity, and governance.

The interdisciplinary project will collect, for the first time in the UK, longitudinal temperature, and humidity data in a panel of 50 care settings in order to quantify the recurring risk of summertime overheating.

The project will also identify and assess social, institutional, and cultural barriers and opportunities underpinning the governance of adaptation to a warmer climate in care and extra-care homes.

ClimaCare will also create a building stock model of the UK’s care provision that is able to predict future overheating risks in care settings under a range of future climate change and operation scenarios.

Links

• Government response to the Climate Change Committee report on progress in adapting to climate change
• Prof Mike Davies
• Dr Anna Mavrogianni