DGHI to Launch Global Network of Climate Observatories

Climate change may be global, but its costs are far from evenly shared. From crippling droughts to more frequent, intense storms and flooding, the most devastating effects of a shifting climate – and its most profound impacts on human health — fall disproportionately on populations that neither caused the problem nor have the resources to fix it.  

“People living in climate-vulnerable communities are bearing the brunt of an issue they have done little to create,” says Chris Beyrer, M.D., director of the Duke Global Health Institute. “If we hope to change that, we need to be engaging with and empowering these communities to create solutions that protect them from further harm.”

To accelerate such engagements, DGHI in January awarded funding to launch four regional observatories that will fuel locally grounded research and educational programming on the health impacts of climate change. Building on long-term partnerships in each region, the observatories will collect and share data, modeling tools and other resources within four regions that are experiencing significant impacts from climate change: the Amazon, East Africa, Southeast Asia and the southern United States. 

Establishment of the observatories is the first step in a three-year strategy from DGHI’s Initiative on Climate and Global Health, a faculty-led effort to promote more interdisciplinary research and education on the health implications of climate change. The initiative will also support new courses and training on health and climate for both Duke students and DGHI’s global partners. 

“DGHI is uniquely positioned to be a hub for these kinds of activities,” says Mercedes Bravo, Ph.D., an assistant professor of global health who co-leads the initiative. “We draw on expertise from across campus, and we have a long history of working in some of the most climate-vulnerable locations around the world.”

Research observatories aggregate data and analytical tools about a particular topic, enabling researchers to study trends and monitor changes in a system over time. DGHI’s climate-focused observatories will integrate public data on factors such as temperature and precipitation patterns, land use, incidence of infectious and chronic diseases, and socioeconomic indicators. DGHI will hire a dedicated data analyst to create uniform structures and harmonize data from disparate sources, ensuring that they can be more easily deployed in comparative research across countries and regions. 

“The idea is to try to set up some common infrastructure across these observatories that would allow for people to do climate and health research more easily,” says Marc Jeuland, Ph.D., a professor of public policy and global health who co-leads the DGHI climate initiative.

But observatories also have a human component, connecting researchers with the interdisciplinary expertise they need to explore the complex relationships between environmental conditions and health. An observatory can be the common link, for example, between an environmental scientist and an epidemiologist who may collaborate to understand how increased heat exposure affects the incidence of chronic diseases. 

“Creating an observatory is not just about making the data available. It’s about bringing the expertise from environmental science into the health sciences more effectively,” says William Pan, Dr. PH, the Elizabeth Brooks Reid and Whitelaw Reid Professor of Global Environmental Health at Duke. 

In October 2024, Pan and DGHI assistant professor Mark Janko, Ph.D., launched the Amazon Research Consortium for Climate Change and One Health [ARC], one of several climate-focused projects already underway in the Amazon that will provide a foundation for the regional observatories. With funding from NASA, the National Institutes of Healthand the InterAmerican Institute for Global Change Research (IAI, as well as support from the National Science Foundation,ARC integrates climate and health data sets from nine countries in South and Central America and is the backbone of several partnerships across the region, including pilot projects between academic researchers and government health officials using AI to forecast malaria outbreaks. The consortium also has a LinkedIn network and a presence on X, nodding to its role in connecting a broad community of researchers and decision-makers on climate and health issues.

While the new observatories will leverage resources such as the ARC to facilitate research within regions, the broader aim is to create an interconnected global network of climate and health researchers, opening the door to cross-regional comparisons of how climate changes are affecting health. That’s important, says Jeuland, because the impacts of climate shifts on health aren’t necessarily uniform, varying significantly with local environmental conditions and social dynamics. 

One example is DGHI’s ongoing investigation of a spike in chronic kidney disease among agricultural workers in Sri Lanka. DGHI researchers are working closely with Sri Lankan partners to understand how changes in the local climate, such as increases in extreme temperatures and drought, may be making farm workers vulnerable to the disease. Having access to similar kinds of data across regions would allow them to see if the same scenario could be playing out in places such as Kenya and North Carolina, and whether and how other local factors, such as air and water pollution, alter risks.

This kind of community engagement will yield interventions that are better suited to local contexts, Jeuland says. “Local knowledge and involvement will be the key to developing interventions that are culturally appropriate, politically feasible, and, at the end of the day, effective,” he notes. 

Launched in fall 2024, DGHI’s climate initiative aims to spark new research and education programs that align with Duke’s Climate Commitment and further DGHI’s mission to advance health equity around the world. It works to leverage expertise from across all of Duke’s schools, as well as the institute’s extensive network of global partners, which include academic research institutions, medical facilities, NGOs and government agencies in more than 40 countries. 

But the initiative also signals the critical threat of climate change to global health, and particularly to the health of populations that are already facing enormous challenges, Bravo says. 

“DGHI’s mission to advance health equity is even more critical under the specter of climate change,” she says. “Trying to address the health risks of climate change without considering health equity risks exacerbating, rather than ameliorating, preventable health disparities.”