Prestigious Wellcome Trust Award for Cathal Walsh and Matthew Chersich

Posted on: 02 December 2024

Professor Cathal Walsh and Professor Matthew Chersich have been awarded a prestigious Wellcome Trust Climate and Health Challenge Award for their Global Heat Attribution Project (GHAP) to track the impacts of climate change on maternal and child health.  Cathal Walsh is a Professor of Biostatistics at the School of Medicine and Matthew Chersich is a Professor in the discipline of Public Health and Primary Care at the School of Medicine. The project has been awarded €3.3M over a 3-year timeframe.

The Climate and Health Challenge Award which is one of a series of projects funded by the Wellcome Trust to understand the impacts of climate change on health and to separate the health impacts of natural variations in weather from the impacts due to weather events attributed to climate change.

What is the Global Heat Attribution Project (GHAP)?

In 2023, the world saw the highest global temperatures in over 100,000 years, with severe and widespread consequences.  Vulnerable populations, including pregnant women and children, for whom extreme heat can be particularly dangerous, now face increasing exposure to heatwaves and temperatures exceeding safe thresholds. Research is increasingly highlighting the wide-ranging health impacts of increasing heat, with many declaring it a public health emergency. Understanding, monitoring and responding to this public health emergency, relies on a robust evidence base of the extent and manner to which climate change is affecting human health. Tracking the impacts of climate change on maternal and child health: the Global Heat Attribution Project (GHAP) focuses on measuring heat impacts on maternal and child health in Africa, Europe and Latin America.   

Using the rapidly advancing science of detection and attribution, the project will use statistical methods of detecting changes in the climate system and attributing associated health impacts from man-made and natural causes.    

GHAP will bring together partners who are experts in researching the impact of climate change on pregnant women and children. The team will separate the effects of natural variation in heat from that of human-induced climate change, on health impacts, such as preterm birth and other outcomes.

Working with a number of global collaborators, the project will link climate data with around 45 million birth records, facilitating complex attribution analyses.

Results from this research will highlight the growing health, and socio-economic consequences of climate inaction.

Project Objectives

The overall objective of the project is to transform measurement approaches in the field of climate change and health from district to global-level, by enabling the team to integrate indicators into routine monitoring systems.

The team will:

• Combine databases with health outcomes from pregnant women and children linked with climate and socioeconomic data from across Africa, Europe and Latin America.
• Quantify heat-related impacts of human-induced climate change on maternal, neonatal, and child health.
• Identify indicators for tracking climate change impacts and adaptation responses suitable for local, national and global monitoring systems.
• Model the effectiveness of adaptation projects, and integrated adaptation and emissions reduction projects.
• Validate the use of 2-4 indicators to inform service planning, resource allocations and priority setting in adaptation and mitigation.

GHAP is one of a series of projects funded by the Wellcome Trust to understand the impacts of climate change on health and to separate the health impacts of natural variations in weather from the impacts due to weather events attributed to climate change. Together these projects would allow us to quantify the human health burdens from climate change, something that to date has been challenging to do since current modelling methods conflate impacts from natural or expected variations in weather and impacts from climate change.  

Professor Matthew Chersich, said:

“Each warm season sets new temperature records, heatwaves expand in frequency, intensity, and duration and more parts of the world become ‘’unworkable’’ and even ‘’unliveable’’. This funding from Wellcome Trust will allow us to quantify the direct impacts of heat exposure on pregnant women, a major, yet under-appreciated, public health threat. The project will draw on data on around 45 million births, analysed together with weather conditions during each of those pregnancies. Through this project we will take important steps towards measuring the actual numbers of adverse pregnancy outcomes that are occurring due to climate change, and developing the monitoring systems for tracking these outcomes globally in the long run.”

 Professor Cathal Walsh, said:

“GHAP will mark a fundamental shift in climate change and health research through its transdisciplinary nature, its unprecedented geographical coverage across Africa, Europe and Latin America and complex analytical processes that will result in actionable outputs that will inform policy and estimations of the human and economic costs of climate change. “

Dr Linda Doyle, Provost and President of Trinity College Dublin

“Trinity is a leader in climate change research and this new project will address a particularly urgent and complex challenge.

The Global Heat Attribution Project will ultimately provide actionable solutions for policy makers based on a deep understanding of the impact of rising temperatures and extreme weather on an especially vulnerable group.

I would like to congratulate Cathal and Matthew on this fantastic award, and thank our School of Medicine and Faculty of Health Sciences for their leadership in this critically important area.”

Professor Sinead Ryan, Dean of Research, Trinity College Dublin, said:

“I am delighted to congratulate Profs Walsh and Chersich and their teams for securing this significant award, which is highly prestigious in the health sciences and a globally-recognised mark of excellence. Trinity looks forward to supporting the research team in pursuit of the much-needed knowledge and solutions this project promises to deliver.”

Professor Colin Doherty, Head of School, Trinity College Dublin, said: 

“We are thrilled to welcome this prestigious €3.3 million grant from the Wellcome Trust Health Challenge Fund for the Global Heat Attribution Project. This award is a testament to the world-class research being conducted by Professors Matthew Chersich and Cathal Walsh, and it underscores the School of Medicine’s commitment to addressing the most pressing global health challenges of our time.

For the School of Medicine, this grant strengthens our position as a leader in pioneering research at the intersection of health and climate science. For Trinity College Dublin, it highlights our role as a beacon of innovation and collaboration on the global stage. For Ireland, it showcases our ability to contribute solutions to complex challenges with far-reaching impacts. And for the world, this project will provide critical insights and tools to mitigate the health impacts of climate change, ensuring a healthier and more equitable future for all.

This is a proud moment for our academic community, and we are excited to see the transformative impact this project will undoubtedly have.”

More information:

Professor Chersich was one of the authors on a recent systematic review on this topic which was published in Nature Medicine.

It is available here: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41591-024-03395-8

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