Zentrum für Künstliche Intelligenz: Klimawandel- und Gesellschaftsanalytik

Modelling of past and future effects of climate change on public health (Apr 2023 – Mär 2026)

The impact of global warming on the burden of disease in the population in Germany and worldwide continues to increase. The challenge now is to establish the specific links between climate change trends and temporal trends in health parameters. The diversity of causal pathways and biological interactions is a challenge for interdisciplinary research. The prerequisite is that the possible influencing factors are viewed from an interdisciplinary (one health) perspective. Estimation of the incidence and trends of disease form the empirical basis for more specific public health action to meet the challenges of global warming. In a first step regarding the modelling of past and future effects of climate change on health, we need realistic estimates of changes in disease incidence and prevalence.

CLIMADEMIC (Mai 2023 – Apr 2028)

The CLIMADEMIC project aims towards finding, systematizing, and predicting coupling mechanisms between the Earth’s changing climate and pandemic dynamics. In this course, state-of-the-art numerical climate models and datasets will be used in combination with the most recent findings from infection biology, disease dynamics, and bioinformatics. Artificial intelligence and causal inference methods will be deployed to bridge the interdisciplinary gap between the different research branches and to reveal governing inter-dynamical processes as formalized causal expressions. These “physics-like” equations will enable us to forecast pandemic dynamics under different future climate change scenarios. CLIMADEMIC will introduce a new level of understanding global and regional climate-induced human health threats, which is the pre-condition for the establishment of mitigation strategies.

Identifying climatic and non-climatic factors driving outbreaks of malaria in Madagascar using artificial intelligence (Oct 2023 – Sep 2026)

Climate change is one of the greatest and most immediate threats to human and planetary health, and Madagascar is one of the countries most affected by climate change in the world. Vector-borne diseases are particularly sensitive to changes in climate. Altered temperature, precipitation, and extreme weather events can all influence the prevalence and distribution of arthropod vectors. Malaria, transmitted by Anopheles mosquitoes, is widespread throughout tropical and subtropical regions. In 2021, there were 247 million cases of malaria worldwide, with 95% of all cases occurring in the WHO Africa Region (WHO 2022). Malaria remains one of the leading causes of death in low-income countries; and is particularly climate-sensitive, with the WHO predicting that climate change will lead to a 15% annual global increase in deaths from malaria between 2030 and 2050 (WHO 2020).

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