About climate change
- Climate change refers to the long-term alteration of Earth’s climate system, including rising global temperatures, shifting weather patterns, and increasing frequency of extreme events primarily caused by human activities such as burning fossil fuels, deforestation, and industrial emissions of greenhouse gases.
- Human-driven global warming is already causing irreversible impacts for people alive today, and these effects will worsen as long as greenhouse gas emissions continue, making urgent global and national action necessary to secure a livable future.
- Environmental consequences already observed include glacier and ice-sheet melt, earlier ice breakup on rivers and lakes, shifts in species ranges, earlier plant flowering, a ~0.2 m rise in global sea level since 1880, and a doubling of burned forest area in recent decades.
- Some climate impacts such as droughts, wildfires, and extreme rainfall, are occurring faster than previously expected, threatening human physical and mental health, food and water security, and the stability of ecosystems and biodiversity.
• According to the World Bank, up to 21 million additional deaths could be caused by climate-related health risks by 2050, especially in LMICs. in 2023, vulnerable groups such as the elderly and infants were exposed to an average of 13.8 heat-stressed days.
- 58% of all infectious diseases are considered climate-sensitive; without prevention, 700,000 additional deaths could occur each year, according to the WHO. Extreme weather conditions and shifts in the habitats of pathogens and vectors increase the risk of epidemics and pandemics.
- Climate extremes such as heat and drought lead to crop failures, impact animal and plant health and increase the risk of hunger. in 2022, around 151 million additional people in 124 countries were affected by food insecurity compared to 1981-2010.
Link: Global climate change and human health: Pathways and possible solutions – PubMed
Climate Change and Health encompasses:
- Heat-health risk management: early warning, heat–health action plans, cooling access, and occupational heat protection for vulnerable groups.
- Air-quality and mitigation co-benefits: reduce short-lived climate pollutants (e.g., black carbon, methane) to cut warming and cardiopulmonary disease burden.
- Climate-resilient health systems: climate-proof facilities and supply chains; maintain essential services; ensure reliable, efficient cooling for vaccines/meds.
- Climate-informed disease prevention: integrate climate signals into surveillance for heat illness, respiratory disease, and climate-sensitive infections.
- Climate-informed surveillance and early warning: fuse meteorological/air-quality data with health indicators; set action thresholds; use interoperable dashboards for rapid response.
- Risk communication and community engagement: targeted messages for heatwaves, poor air days, and extreme events; outreach to at-risk patients.
- Mental health and urban adaptation: psychosocial support post-disasters and heat events; cool cities (shade/greening) and safe cooling centers to reduce heat stress
Project profile
Horn of Africa
Project: SCIDA III- Strengthening the Capacities of IGAD to increase Resilience in the Horn of Africa
Project no.: 2019.2326.7
Countries: Djibouti, Ethiopia, Kenya, Somalia, South Suda, Sudan, Uganda
Goal: The capacities of the intergovernmental organisation IGAD in cross-border disaster risk management are strengthened at regional and local level
Specific climate-health objective: To strengthen IGAD and Member State capacities to use open, interoperable and data-protection-compliant digital surveillance and data-sharing solutions for COVID-19 and other epidemic-prone, climate-sensitive and zoonotic diseases, thereby improving regional pandemic preparedness, early warning and One Health resilience in the Horn of Africa.
Implementation period:
04.2022 – 01.2027
Budget: €8.700.000
Situation before the project:
- The Horn of Africa is highly exposed to climate change, with a large share of the population belonging to cross-border migratory pastoralist communities, where land degradation, displacement and infectious disease dynamics are closely linked.
- Disease surveillance in the IGAD region was largely national, fragmented and unevenly digitized, with limited cross-border data exchange and no operational IGAD-level interoperable data warehouse for epidemic-prone diseases.
Climate change impacts addressed:
- Vector-borne disease expansion and zoonotic disease emergence.
- Indirect addressed impacts:
- Extreme heat / heatwaves, flooding / heavy rainfall, drought / water scarcity.
- Food insecurity and biodiversity loss.
- Displacement, pastoralist mobility, habitat degradation, cross-border disease spread.
- The project addressed these risks through a Digital One Health lens rather than direct ecosystem restoration: drought, flooding, heat, land degradation, food insecurity, displacement and changing disease dynamics weaken livelihoods, move people and livestock across borders, change vector/pathogen ecology and disrupt routine surveillance.
Affected Populations & One Health Linkages
Most affected populations:
- Cross-border mobile populations, pastoralist and agro-pastoralist communities, traders, border communities, refugees, and communities in arid and semi-arid lands.
- Vulnerable people due to dependence on livestock, land, water and seasonal mobility, exposure to droughts, floods, food insecurity and displacement, and distance from central health infrastructure.
- Women, children, older persons and people with limited access to health services are particularly vulnerable; border health workers and epidemiologists were a key target group.
One Health interlinkages:
- Climate change alters rainfall, water availability, vegetation, pasture quality and vector habitats, affecting livestock movements, animal health and wildlife-human-livestock contact.
- As pastoralists, traders, animals and goods move across borders for water, pasture, food and markets, pathogens and vectors spread rapidly across administrative boundaries.
- Human health: communicable disease outbreaks, malnutrition, disrupted access to care. Animal health: livestock disease, reduced productivity, zoonotic transmission risk. Environment: land degradation, shrinking habitats, water scarcity, biodiversity loss.
- The regional pandemic analytics dashboard addressed this interdependence by enabling integration, governance and analysis of data across sectors and levels, rather than treating outbreaks as isolated human health events.
Main entry points:
- Regional disease surveillance strengthening for COVID-19 and other epidemic-prone diseases.
- Development of a regional pandemic analytics dashboard (RePan) and data warehouse concept.
- Agreement on minimum datasets and indicators for regional disease reporting.
- Regional Health Data Sharing and Data Protection Policy Framework.
- Interoperability through existing national systems
- Adaptive expansion from COVID-19 to Ebola, Monkeypox and notifiable diseases, creating the basis for a broader Digital One Health platform.
Adaptation Strategy & Local Knowledge
Climate-health adaptation / mitigation strategies used:
• Early warning / surveillance systems, policy and legislation reform, capacity development / training, research and data systems, and open-source digital public infrastructure, interoperability and data protection.
Local knowledge & community participation:
• Integrated through participatory assessments, cross-border consultations and engagement of local health and border actors, drawing on realities of pastoralist mobility, border trade and remote service delivery.
• Baseline/needs assessments at cross-border sites and consultations with district and border health officials informed the design of RePan, data-sharing arrangements and endpoint infrastructure.
Challenges & Adaptions
Main challenges encountered:
- Political instability and conflict, especially in Sudan and parts of Ethiopia, affected cooperation, procurement, deployment and site access.
- COVID-19 restrictions limited travel, in-person training and equipment deployment; the Ebola outbreak in Uganda required attention and capacity shifts.
- Digital maturity differed widely across Member States; data sensitivity and sovereignty concerns required trust-building before technical exchange could scale.
- Connectivity, power and hardware limitations in border areas; siloed sector mandates limited early integration of animal, environment and plant health data.
Solutions and adaptations found:
- Shifted to remote coordination and agile technical support; moved from a single-application logic to a flexible regional data warehouse architecture.
- Developed the Regional Health Data Sharing and Data Protection Policy Framework and adopted minimum datasets to make reporting feasible.
- Focused hardware support on cross-border sites; used train-the-trainer and local hosting
- •Expanded RePan toward Ebola, Mpox and multi-disease surveillance, building SpeedyMesh, and linked the work to regional and local systems after closure.
Efficiancy & Sustainability
- Efficiency gains from cross-sector coordination:
- A single regional architecture reduced the need for parallel disease-specific dashboards (COVID-19, Ebola, Mpox built on the same core logic).
- The ‘reuse and improve’ approach connected digital assets instead of replacing them; shared governance reduced transaction costs for cross-border data exchange.
- Sustainability & scale-up potential:
- Institutional: IGAD as regional owner/coordinator, with Member States engaged via technical working groups.
- Policy: Regional Health Data Sharing and Protection Policy as governance basis.
- Technical: RePan built with reusable components, becoming the first step of the SpeedyMesh Digital Public Good / Digital Public Infrastructure.
- Scaling: architecture and experience informed AU-DOHP (continental) and COHIS (Cameroon).
What facilitated the project implementation ?
- Key enabling factors:
- Strong regional mandate of IGAD for cross-border coordination and resilience in the Horn of Africa.
- High political urgency created by COVID-19 and later Ebola/Mpox outbreaks.
- EU and BMZ financing, which enabled a regional rather than purely national response.
- Existing digital health assets in Member States, especially DHIS2, SORMAS and national surveillance systems.
- A clear ‘reuse and improve’ principle, avoiding unnecessary replacement of national systems.
- Development and endorsement of the Regional Health Data Sharing and Data Protection Policy Framework.
- Technical availability of open-source and standards-based components.
- Engagement of IGAD Member States through technical working groups, policy consultations and cross-border assessments.
- Speedykom technical support and the emergence of RePan/SpeedyMesh as reusable digital public infrastructure.
- Follow-on institutional demand from AU-IBAR, the African Union and national One Health platforms.
- Key lessons for other practitioners:
- Treat Digital One Health as a governance and data architecture challenge, not only a software challenge; start data-sharing and sovereignty discussions at the very beginning.
- Use open-source, modular architecture so tools survive beyond the funding cycle; reuse existing national systems instead of replacing them.
- Include human health, animal health, environment, plant health, climate and disaster-risk actors early; invest in endpoint realities (hardware, connectivity, power, maintenance).
- Build around regional trust (minimum datasets, agreed access rights, transparent governance); design for crisis conditions; plan from the start for open-source publication and scale-up pathways.
Crosscutting resource- and cost efficiency effects in the IGAD- Region
Project impact and challenges
