Adapting to temperature extremes in a changing climate: Past trends and future scenarios (ADATES)

Temperature extremes negatively affect public health and well-being. These detrimental impacts are unevenly distributed, and affect most those who are already vulnerable.

Moreover, they are projected to increase under future climate change.Taking Sweden as a case-in-point, this project aims to address the following questions, of key relevance for ensuring a socially just adaptation to future temperatures: (1) which groups are most vulnerable to non-optimal and extreme temperatures? (2) what is the interplay between environmental drivers, societal processes, adaptation strategies and the resulting health impacts? and (3) how can adaptation strategies mitigate the health impacts of plausible future temperatures?These questions will be addressed by quantifying the excess risk of adverse health outcomes related to exposure to non-optimal and extreme temperatures including an analysis of historical trends and drivers of the adaptation process.

Leveraging available climate projections, we will also develop scenarios of health impacts of future temperatures incorporating different adaptation strategies.This effort is timely, as the expectation of continued large impacts of temperature extremes points to the urgency of reducing their uneven distribution and designing a long-term adaptation process.

Sweden offers highly spatially and temporally resolved registers of health data, unique in the international context, that can be rapidly and effectively leveraged towards this goal.