Climate Change, Syndemics and Social Vulnerability: A Case Study in Northern Peru

Keywords: syndemic, social vulnerability, GIS, climate change, El Niño, health inequity
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Sunday
Session Start / End Time: 2/27/2022 08:00 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/27/2022 09:20 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 13

Abstract

The effects of climate change on health is an urgent concern for public health and communities worldwide. Climate change, variability and extreme events can impact human health and well-being through various direct and indirect pathways, including heat-related and flood-related exposures, reduced air quality, changing disease ecologies, and population displacement, modulated by the distribution of social determinants of health. While numerous studies focus on climate links to one disease at a time, less attention has been paid to the multi-disease risk in communities, which often intersects with social inequities. In many instances, said disease patterns may heighten and cluster during extreme climate events, such as those spawned by the air-sea phenomenon El Niño. Understanding how these multi-disease patterns are related to one another, how they cluster and shift, and how climate and social vulnerability influence clustering is critical to mitigate the health effects and inequities of climate change. In this study, we present a case study in northern Peru focused on the extreme El Niño of 1998. To conceptualize multi-disease risk, we employed the concept of ecosyndemic, which builds on the emergent theory of syndemic, to characterize the overlap of simultaneous disease outbreaks spawned by environmental changes in socially vulnerable places. Using GIS and multiple methods, we examined the spatial overlap and patterns of 7 climate-sensitive diseases, individually and as composite indices, in relationship to social and disaster vulnerability indicators. The main findings are discussed along with applications, challenges, and future work.