Climate change and human health: Estimating district-level health vulnerabilities in the Indian context

Abstract

Evidence on the health impact of climate change has been extensively documented in recent scholarly literature. In order to mitigate the adverse health effects induced by climate change, the need for conducting vulnerability assessments has been emphasized. A higher vulnerability to climate change is often linked with substantial risks to human lives and built environment. Despite the potential of vulnerability assessments in alleviating risks posed by climate change, only a limited amount of scholarly work in this domain has been conducted in the Indian context. The present research addresses this lacuna and contributes to the limited scholarship on climate change and health vulnerability assessments in India. Drawing on the vulnerability assessment framework introduced by the fourth assessment report (AR4) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), this paper estimates district-level health vulnerabilities caused by climate change using multi-dimensional indices. The indices are multi-dimensional since they integrate 50 district-level indicators from 8 data sources for all 640 Census 2011 districts. The statistical technique of Principal Component Analysis (PCA) has been used for integrating the indicators. The findings of this paper indicate that nearly 56 percent of India’s population in 344 districts is highly vulnerable to the health impact of climate change. The results also suggest that Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Jharkhand, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Punjab, Uttarakhand, Jammu and Kashmir, and Arunachal Pradesh have the highest number of districts in the top-10 percent vulnerable category. The paper argues that measures to address social determinants of health and strengthen adaptive capacity are needed to reduce health vulnerabilities to climate change.