The power of data in addressing health impacts of climate change

As our planet continues to confront the urgent challenge of mitigating and adapting to climate change, there is growing recognition of its impact on human health. From rising temperatures to more frequent natural disasters, these changes are already having significant effects on our health, including increases in zoonoses, vector-borne diseases, and mental health issues. According to World Health Organization estimates, climate change is expected to cause approximately 250,000 additional deaths per year between 2030 and 2050.

Yet, health and climate change are largely addressed separately. “The climate crisis is a health crisis, and we need to urgently begin to work together to build an ecosystem that connects the two,” said Uyi Stewart, chief data and technology officer at data.org — a platform for partnerships to build the field of data for social impact. “The common denominator is the data on health and the data on climate. Therefore, data can connect the dots between the siloed tools and domains to inform better decision-making.”

Through its Capacity Accelerator Network, or CAN, data.org is committed to training 1 million, purpose-driven data practitioners by 2032 through a global ecosystem of academic, philanthropic, social impact, government, and private sector partners. The aim is to build talent to solve systemic challenges such as those at the intersection of climate change and health. On Monday, the initiative, already running in the U.S. and across Africa, expanded to Asia through the India Data Capacity Accelerator.  

While universities are training data scientists, students are not trained in interdisciplinarity, according to Stewart. “That’s why we are training people who can connect the dots between their lived experience and disparate data sets to support social impact organizations as they work to create new solutions.”

Speaking with Devex, Stewart elaborated on the power of data in addressing challenges at the intersection of climate and health, and how data.org is working to build a talent pool and global ecosystem to support this effort.

The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

How can data help solve challenges at the intersection of climate and health, particularly in low- and middle-income countries?

We currently deal with climate and health on different verticals — all the tools, resources, and data for climate are on one vertical, while health is on another. The problem is that to the individuals who are affected, verticalization doesn’t matter.

In Africa, for example, malaria is a prevalent disease that kills hundreds of thousands of people. Climate change directly impacts malaria by influencing the vector and parasite development responsible for its transmission. So, it's not about health, it's not about climate — it’s about the connected impact of both on the individual and the collective.

We cannot develop real solutions to these challenges unless we connect the two fields together. And data allows us to do that — to draw correlations, build better interventions, and make better policies.

What is the opportunity for jobs and growth in the data for social impact field in LMICs?

Last year, we worked with the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation and Dalberg to deliver  a report on global data talent in the social sector. The research showed that there is an opportunity to create roughly 3.5 million data for social impact jobs in developing countries over the next decade. The problem is, there is a big gap in the workforce because universities are not training or providing pathways for students to become what we call purpose-driven data practitioners.

What’s more, right now, we see a disproportionate absence of people of color, women, and other minority groups — especially across LMICs — that have a seat at the table. These models are biased because they have been developed by a select few who are not on the ground in the local environment because a lot of human capacity for using data is still very global north-centric.

That’s why we need to develop and grow talent locally, and do so in a way that is fundamentally different from how we develop talent now, not just in terms of technical skills, but also in terms of interdisciplinary skills. We need a new kind of data scientist who cares about the connection across the data sets to bridge silos, and ultimately, cares about problem-solving and positive social and environmental impact.

Data.org has committed to training one million, purpose-driven data practitioners by 2032 through the Capacity Accelerator Network. Can you talk us through the initiative?

So I used to be a funder at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. And here again, we see verticalization across funding organizations in LMICs. We need a new approach that creates a global ecosystem in which there is a way to leverage each other's work, learn from each other, and build on each other. What CAN is seeking to do is to address the problem of capacity and talent through a global ecosystem of partners — including funders — who are connected.

 
To build this capacity, first you need a curriculum. Second, you need a training platform. And third, you need pedagogy contextualized for different geographical locations so that the content remains the same, but the way it’s taught is different based on cultural context.

In the U.S., we started to work on financial inclusion based on grants from Mastercard and built a robust network that became the U.S. accelerator. Then we expanded to work on the intersection of climate and health, first across Africa and now in India.

And as we go into Africa and India, we don't have to start from scratch. We leverage what we’ve created in the U.S., but  localize it in other geographies to build that global ecosystem. That's our global approach to capacity building — scaling through a network of networks.

You mentioned CAN just expanded through its Data Capacity Accelerator in India. What are the aims of the expansion?

There are really no dedicated mechanisms to grow purpose-driven data practitioners. Yet we know that social impact organizations need quality data and data analysis to deploy solutions to  big global systemic challenges. This is especially true in India, which is on the front lines of the climate crisis. And so our number one objective is to create an accelerator — or a network of networks — within India that results in a unified ecosystem of practitioners, universities, government entities, and private sector organizations who are all focused on building talent to address systemic challenges across health and climate.

Our second big objective is localization. That is, we need local partners. In this case, we've identified universities critical to our success, to help to begin to localize the curriculum and to make sure it is relevant to India and accessible to Indian practitioners.

And our last objective is to embed experiential learning. We're not just going to train people, we're not just going to localize the curriculum, but in partnership with Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab, or J-PAL, South Asia, we're also going to provide students with fellowship opportunities. Through the fellowship program, students can begin to implement what they have learned, begin to use data to build solutions, and inform policy to transform both the health and climate intersection challenges in India.

How can others support the work you’re doing to build data capacity in the social sector?

An endeavor like ours cannot and should not be done by one organization because that contradicts the very problem we are trying to solve — fragmentation in the data-for-social-impact sector. We believe that there is a role for all partners across sectors. You can support us through a willingness to collaborate to share your tools, and your data, and your knowledge. Because the issues that we face are systemic. It's going to take all of us working together through shared resources of tools, data, and talent toward addressing these challenges.

Do you have a call to action you’d like to share with the global development community?

The climate crisis is a health crisis. Join data.org to build a purpose-driven data ecosystem to address these interconnected and systemic challenges together to achieve impact.