CHARISMA: limiting climate and health risks in India

Climate change: impact on heat and health

Climate change influences everyone’s lives in various ways – now and in the future. In India, for instance, 160 to 200 million people will, in the next ten years, be exposed to extreme heat waves so extreme they will surpass the survival threshold.  

Additionally, climate change directly impacts vector-borne diseases. Because the lifecycle of insects is controlled by weather conditions, which means these vectors will develop differently or more quickly.

Supporting governments with relevant data

CHARISMA was initiated to help Indian cities combat the harmful consequences of the climate. We wanted to support regional and local Indian governments in setting up no-regret climate and health strategies and adaptation plans. 

We focused mainly on problems related to:

• extreme heat stress 

• climate-sensitive, vector-borne diseases such as malaria, dengue and chikungunya in urban environments

We mapped the various levels of heat stress in combination with the number of related hospitalisations. To do that, we extracted scientific data from the Copernicus Climate Data Store (CDS). We used that data as input for VITO’s generated UrbClim model. That model can be used by policymakers to predict heat stress conditions in various cities.

Because the urbanisation in India is growing, it was only logical to factor in that aspect on top of the heat stress conditions. We relied on VITO’s GeoDynamiX toolbox to do so. By combining these two tools, VITO created a climate service that enabled the visualisation and assessment of climate change consequences at a local scale.  

Funding

CHARISMA was financed by the Flemish government’s International Climate Fund and our partner Avia-GIS.