ABSTRACT
The health consequences of climate variability and change are diverse, potentially affecting the burden of a wide range of health outcomes, including illnesses and deaths related to cardiovascular and respiratory ailments, infectious and vector-borne disease, malnutrition, and poor water quality. Two major thrusts of spatial analysis emerged in the climate-health community. The first leverages theoretical notions of vulnerability, susceptibility, hazard, and exposure, to produce maps of expected patterns of adverse health impacts associated with climate-sensitive hazards. The second leverages spatially explicit health outcome data to relate observed patterns to spatially varying determinants of risk. Vulnerability maps are useful for identifying where the societal impacts — including those related to health — of climate-sensitive hazards are likely to be most severe. Two basic modeling approaches — statistically-based approaches and process-based approaches — are used to project the future geographic distribution and burden of climate sensitive health outcomes; these approaches can reach different conclusions.
