SA launches first climate and health surveillance platform

South Africa has launched its first national climate and health surveillance platform, a pioneering research and decision-support tool designed to strengthen the country’s ability to understand and respond to the growing health impacts of climate change . The platform, available through the Climate Health Surveillance South Africa website , was conceptualised and developed by Professor Caradee Wright, with support from the South African Medical Research Council (SAMRC) and the University of Pretoria. The launch comes as South Africa increasingly experiences the health effects of climate-related environmental conditions, from extreme heat and worsening air pollution to flooding , drought and climate-sensitive diseases . In recent years, research Wright and colleagues led has highlighted how prolonged heat exposure places outdoor workers, children, older people and low-income communities at increased risk of dehydration, heat stress , respiratory illness and other adverse health outcomes. The risks are expected to intensify as temperatures continue to rise. Against this backdrop, the platform was developed to help researchers, policymakers, public health practitioners and other stakeholders better visualise and interpret climate, environmental and health data in a single system. “The most important reason for producing this platform is to visualise our data,” Wright, the chief specialist scientist at the SAMRC, said. “It’s to show South Africa, Africa and the world that we have data, we have good data and we can look at our data. I’m really trying to encourage the sharing of data for visualisation so we can look at it and tell stories, find stories and show the use of investing money in collecting data.” She said the platform was also intended to demonstrate the value of the country’s health information systems and encourage broader data sharing. “For example, it would be wonderful if district health information system data could be electronic at the levels that we need it and available on a daily timescale, which we don’t yet have.” According to information on the platform, users can explore a range of climate, environmental and health indicators through maps, graphs and other visualisation tools. The platform brings together health and environmental datasets to support surveillance, research and evidence-based decision-making around climate-related health risks. One of the first patterns emerging from the platform shows a clear link between extreme weather and health outcomes, which is what scientists would expect. “There’s a really interesting one if you look at flood events and diarrhoea. After a dry period with fewer flood events and then an increase in flood events — this is for the whole country — we see an increase in diarrhoea, which is what we would expect because obviously with more water flowing, contamination of water can then lead to an increase in poor hygiene and the spread of diarrhoeal disease.” The platform has also highlighted important gaps in South Africa’s understanding of heat-related health impacts. “I haven’t explored everything — and there’s so much to look at — but the other one that I have looked at is heat. It’s interesting that there’s a good linkage between heatwaves and high temperatures. We haven’t yet got a very good health indicator for that.” South Africa, Wright said, lacked appropriate health indicators to fully understand how extreme heat affected people’s health. “We would ideally want something like heat stress but we don’t really get data around that, not in the district health information system, so we’d have to look at hospital records but those aren’t digitised.” The platform allows analysis at provincial level. Early findings suggest parts of the Northern Cape are particularly vulnerable to heat and heatwaves, while the Western Cape and Eastern Cape also face significant flooding risks, as do Limpopo and Mpumalanga. North West is vulnerable to heatwaves. Wright cautioned that the platform had not yet incorporated socio-economic demographic information, making it difficult to identify which communities might be most socially vulnerable to climate-related health risks. “We haven’t yet pulled in the socio-economic demographic data, so we will draw in the census data to get a sense of social vulnerability. We might do this using the Social Vulnerability Index, so it’s difficult to say right now which provinces are most vulnerable from a socio-economic vulnerability perspective. But we can see from the extreme weather data that certain provinces are more susceptible to extreme weather events and different kinds of extreme weather events.” The current version of the platform combines multiple datasets, including historical temperature and rainfall information from the University of East Anglia, South African Weather Service extreme weather event records from 1991 to 2024