The attribution of human health outcomes to climate change: transdisciplinary practical guidance

Ebi, K. L., Haines, A., Andrade, R. F. S., Åström, C., Barreto, M. L., Bonell, A., Bowen, K., Brink, N., Caminade, C., Carlson, C. J., Carter, R., Chua, P., Cissé, G., Colón-González, F. J., Dasgupta, S., Galvao, L. A., Zornoza, M. Garrido, Gasparrini, A., Gordon-Strachan, G., Hajat, S., Harper, S., Harrington, L. J., Hashizume, M., Hess, J., Hilly, J., Ingole, V., Jacobson, L. V., Kapwata, T., Keeler, C., Kidd, S. A., Kimani-Murage, E. W., Kolli, R. K., Kovats, S., Li, S., Lowe, R., Mitchell, D., Murray, K., New, M., Ogunniyi, O. E., Perkins-Kirkpatrick, S. E., Pescarini, J., Restrepo, B. L. Pineda, Pinho, S. T. R., Prescott, V., Redvers, N., Ryan, S. J., Santer, B. D., Schleussner, C. F., Semenza, J. C., Taylor, M., Temple, L., Thiam, S., Thiery, W., Tompkins, A. M., Undorf, S., Vicedo-Cabrera, A. M., Wan, K., Warren, R., Webster, C., Woodward, A., Wright, C. Y. and Stuart-Smith, R. F. (2025) The attribution of human health outcomes to climate change: transdisciplinary practical guidance. Climatic Change, 178 (8). ISSN 0165-0009

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Abstract

For over 30 years, detection and attribution (D&A) studies have informed key conclusions in international and national assessments of climate science, providing compelling evidence for the reality and seriousness of anthropogenic effects on the global climate. In the early twenty-first century, D&A methods were adapted to assess the contribution of climate change to longer-term trends in earth system processes and extreme weather events. More recently, attribution research quantified the health and economic impacts of climate change. Here we provide practical guidance to inform transdisciplinary collaboration among health, climate, and other relevant scientific disciplines and interested parties in designing, conducting, interpreting, and reporting robust and policy-relevant attribution analyses of human health outcomes. This guidance resulted from discussions among experts in health and climate science. Recommended steps include co-developing the research questions across disciplines; establishing a transdisciplinary analytic team with fundamental grounding in the core disciplines; engaging meaningfully with relevant interested parties and decision-makers to define an appropriate study design and analytic process, including defining the exposure event or trend; identifying, visualizing, and describing linkages in the causal pathway from exposure to weather/climate variables to the health outcome(s) of interest; choosing appropriate counterfactual climate data, and where applicable, to evaluate the skill of the climate and health impact model(s) used in D&A research; quantifying the attributable changes in climate variables; quantifying the attributable health impacts within the context of other determinants of exposure and vulnerability; and reporting key results, including a description of how recommendations were incorporated into the analytical plan. Implementation of guidance would benefit diverse interested parties including researchers, research funders, policymakers, and climate litigation by harmonizing methods and increasing confidence in findings.

Item Type:	Article
Uncontrolled Keywords:	climate change,detection and attribution,guidance,health,methods,global and planetary change,atmospheric science ,/dk/atira/pure/subjectarea/asjc/2300/2306
Faculty \ School:	Faculty of Science > School of Environmental Sciences University of East Anglia Research Groups/Centres > Theme - ClimateUEA
UEA Research Groups:	University of East Anglia Schools > Faculty of Science > Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research Faculty of Science > Research Centres > Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research Faculty of Science > Research Centres > Centre for Ecology, Evolution and Conservation Faculty of Science > Research Groups > Centre for Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences Faculty of Science > Research Groups > Environmental Social Sciences
Related URLs:	http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?...
Depositing User:	LivePure Connector
Date Deposited:	18 Mar 2026 17:30
Last Modified:	22 Mar 2026 06:30
URI:	https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/102472
DOI:	10.1007/s10584-025-03976-7

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