DHIS2 provides flexible tools for integrating climate, weather, and environmental data–as well as other geospatial data sets–into DHIS2 data elements to facilitate analysis of climatic impacts on health outcomes and support predictive modeling of climate-sensitive diseases.
In many health programs–such as infectious disease surveillance or maternal and child health–health outcomes can be directly and indirectly influenced by local climate variation, extreme weather events, and changes in human behavior linked to weather factors and climate change. Understanding the relationship between climate, weather, and environmental data and health outcomes is essential for developing effective public health interventions and adaptation strategies. Doing this requires tools for bringing climate and health data together.
Ministries of Health in 75+ countries use DHIS2 as their locally owned, national-scale system for health information management, leveraging it for data-driven decision making across health programs. Through the DHIS2 Climate & Health project, we have worked with international experts and local stakeholders in Africa and Asia to develop innovative tools that make it possible for countries to easily integrate climate data drawn from the best available data sets–both local and global–into their existing DHIS2 systems.
The data integrated with these tools can be analyzed and visualized using the built-in analytics features in DHIS2, and can be used to power predictive modeling and forecasting of climate-sensitive diseases through the DHIS2 Chap Modeling Platform.
The DHIS2 Climate App is a DHIS2 application that provides a means to easily integrate historical and current weather and environmental data from high-quality global datasets into DHIS2 through a user-friendly interface, with no coding required. It can be downloaded and installed into an existing DHIS2 system through the DHIS2 App Hub.
The app allows DHIS2 users to explore daily and monthly temperature, precipitation, and humidity data–and more–for your organization units, and to import it as DHIS2 data elements. These data sets are automatically harmonized with health data in DHIS2, allowing them to be analyzed and visualized together through a variety of charts, graphs, and maps. They can also be used for predictive modeling through the DHIS2 Modeling App and Chap Modeling Platform.
The app draws on a curated selection of high-quality data sources, including ERA-5 land, which is considered to be the most accurate and complete climate dataset available with worldwide coverage, the CHIRPS rainfall dataset, and satellite-based datasets from the Climate Hazards Center. Current datasets available in the Climate App include:
The data is calculated for DHIS2 organisation units by using Google Earth Engine. DHIS2 instances must have the Google Earth Engine enabled in order to use the Climate App. DHIS2 Climate Tools provide a fully open-source alternative, and we are currently working on open-source alternatives for data harmonization within the Climate App itself.
DHIS2 Climate Tools is a toolkit containing open-source libraries and workflows that you can use to access, process and upload local and global climate, weather and environmental data–or other geospatial datasets, such as intervention data–to DHIS2 and the Chap Modeling Platform. This toolkit is available on the DHIS2 Climate Tools website.
DHIS2 Climate Tools are based on the Python programming language and ecosystem. Python is the leading programming language for geospatial analysis, offering a rich ecosystem of libraries and tools to build on, and helping make complex spatial operations accessible to both beginners and experts.
Unlike the DHIS2 Climate App, using DHIS2 Climate Tools requires programming skills. This toolkit is intended for two primary audiences that carry out different functions related to climate data and DHIS2:
On the DHIS2 Climate Tools website, you can explore existing guides and workflows that have been developed by HISP HiO and our partners in the HISP network. DHIS2 Climate Tools and are fully open source and are intended to be a collaborative toolkit–we welcome input and contributions from the global DHIS2 community.
Open Climate Service is an open-source solution that empowers countries to integrate data from many different sources into a locally owned platform and use them to produce tailored climate services — to help make informed decisions, manage risks, and adapt to climate change. Open Climate Service is currently in development by HISP UiO and our in-country partners. It is available for testing on the Open Climate Service website.
Open Climate Service addresses a key challenge in climate and health: climate and earth observation data is distributed across dozens of providers — each with different APIs, formats, and access mechanisms. In addition, the commonly available tools for integrating these datasets are not open-source, creating risks of vendor lock-in and potentially compromising digital sovereignty. By using Open Climate Service, countries can take full control over their use of local and global data sets, and produce tailored climate services that meet their specific needs.
Open Climate Service brings together climate, environmental, and societal data, tailors it to your local context, and delivers it to the tools you already use. It lets you select the data sets you are interested in, download them for your country and the time period of your choosing to your own local instance (and keep them up-to-date automatically), integrate and tailor the data, and send it to DHIS2 or other tools. You can also customize and extend your local Open Climate Service instance by adding custom data sources, building your own processing workflows, or using it as a backend for your own application or modeling platform.
Open Climate Service is currently a work in progress, and we welcome feedback and input from the global community.
DHIS2 tools for climate data integration are continuously evolving to respond to emerging country needs and global knowledge on climate and health. We invite you to share your questions, experiences, and ideas for data integration on the DHIS2 Community of Practice.