Building a Locally Informed Climate and Health Data Infrastructure in Bangladesh

This project aims to strengthen the global evidence base on climate change, vulnerability, and health by piloting and validating a climate shock survey in Chakaria—a coastal region highly exposed to extreme weather events. Chakaria’s vulnerability to cyclones, floods, and heatwaves presents a critical opportunity to understand how climate stressors affect health outcomes, particularly among the poorest and most marginalized. The team will collect household-level data on climate exposure and health burden, deploy low-cost environmental monitoring equipment, and integrate these data with two decades of health and demographic surveillance data. This initiative addresses an urgent equity gap: while research has documented broad health impacts of climate change, there is a lack of granular, spatially-resolved data on how these impacts intersect with social inequality in vulnerable communities. 

Beyond survey validation, the project will build a robust climate-health research and surveillance platform in Bangladesh that can inform locally tailored resilience strategies and policies. By linking high-resolution climate data with socioeconomic and health information, the study will generate actionable insights into how wealth, infrastructure, and geography mediate health risks during climate shocks. The outcomes will not only benefit Bangladesh—ranked among the top nations for climate risk—but also provide a replicable model for other low- and middle-income countries facing similar challenges. In the long term, this work is designed to support climate-adaptive public health systems and catalyze large-scale interventions that protect vulnerable populations from the worsening impacts of climate change.