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, live weather observations from an online sensor network and health indicator data spanning 2000 to 2024.
She hopes the platform will help government departments better use information that is being collected and shift from reacting to climate-related disasters to preparing for them.
“The first thing I want is for government departments to look at the data and understand that especially the national department of health and all our health facilities around the country, the health indicator data — those are their data, they are collecting that data on a weekly or monthly basis and I want them to see that it’s going somewhere; it’s being used.”
The aim is to update the platform regularly so emerging trends can be monitored in near real time.
“We can look at this data in near real time. At the moment, that’s hoping it will be every month that we’ll update the data so we can see what’s going on and what the patterns are like.
“When you can see what’s going on, we’ll have a better understanding of why you need to, at this stage, react because we are probably not so good at preparing … When there’s a flood event, we rush in and try to do disaster risk management.
“We don’t really want to go forward doing that. We want to prepare, be ready and prevent ill-health and harm occurring during extreme weather events.”
Ultimately, Wright hopes the platform will help authorities anticipate health impacts before floods, heatwaves and other extreme weather events occur, for example the increase in dehydration and diarrhoea that typically occurs after a flood.
“If you can see that this is happening, then let’s think of the best way we can work out through the science with the modelling … what we can put in place to do, so we can protect health before it comes. That then builds into what would become phase 1, 2 and 3 of the platform, which is the information to inform awareness and preparedness.”
One of Wright’s ambitions is to integrate data from low-cost sensors that measure temperature, humidity and air quality in clinics, schools and older persons’ homes — settings identified as particularly vulnerable to climate-related health impacts.
“The idea will be to draw in data from low-cost sensors measuring temperature, relative humidity and air quality. We have a lot of these in place in clinics and schools around South Africa. I want to introduce the sensors into all the older adult homes and I want to then do these real-world intervention trials in those three settings.”
The trials would test whether climate-health warnings could trigger practical measures to reduce harm during extreme weather.
“Those settings are really vulnerable settings identified as well by the national climate change and health adaptation plan. We will then be rolling out … a chest that will have, for example … paper cups, Rehidrat, potentially bottled water if there isn’t water available, solar-powered fans, cooling towels and then laminated information sheets.”
Wright envisages facilities receiving advance notice of heatwaves, for example, and activating designated climate-health champions to help implement protective measures.
“There will be a person who becomes sort of a champion in that space, so when they get the information that the platform sends — that there is going to be, say a heatwave — we’re going to send it the day before and morning of. That person will then be activated.”
The idea would be to encourage simple behavioural changes that could reduce heat-related health risks.
“Championing the idea of at least making people aware … to really inform them that it’s very hot in here, we can see from the data that temperature is 38°C, please unswaddle your babies, here’s water, here’s a cooling towel … We can start to see whether we can get uptake of these behaviours.
“It’s going to be difficult to assess impact — that’s going to come down the line — but let’s at least get going with the interventions and testing behavioural impacts.”
Wright said the platform responded to the growing need for locally relevant climate-health intelligence capable of informing practical public health responses.
“Climate change is no longer a future threat, it is affecting health outcomes and placing pressure on vulnerable communities and health systems.
“This platform creates an important foundation for understanding where risks are emerging, how environmental conditions intersect with health and how evidence can better support decision-making and preparedness.”
Wright described the launch as only the beginning.
“This is really just phase zero, so I’m looking forward to growing this and leaving this as a legacy, I hope.”
The tool allows researchers and policymakers to track links between extreme weather, heatwaves, flooding and health outcomes