Who are we and what do we do
Contents
Project Overview
The impacts on health of rising temperatures, wildfires, extreme weather events and other direct and indirect effects of climate change are a major global concern. The most significant hazards and their impacts differ between countries and disaggregated geographies, as do the possibilities and priorities for climate change adaptation. National and local governments and other stakeholders need to have regular, reliable and comparable data to monitor climate impacts and inform adaptation strategies, based on a transparent and globally generalisable statistical framework.
Standards for Official Statistics on Climate-Health Interactions (SOSCHI) is a four-year project (2022 to 2026), led by the UK Office for National Statistics and funded by Wellcome (Grant number: 224682/Z/21/Z).
Our aim is to develop a framework of indicators based on state-of-the-art statistical methods to measure climate- related health risks. To support global reporting and monitoring, we are also developing a knowledge-sharing platform, open-source tools, and R code. Our findings will also help highlight data gaps and help set the agenda for future improvement of data sources and methods.
Contact details: Please email [email protected] to be added to the mailing list for our Stakeholder update.
Related Links: SOSCHI records on Zenodo
Project Partners
The project is a collaboration between:
- African Institute for Mathematical Sciences (AIMS), Rwanda
- Cochrane Planetary Health Thematic Group , University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada
- Office for National Statistics (ONS), Newport, United Kingdom
- Regional Institute for Population Studies (RIPS), University of Ghana, Accra, Ghana
- UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) , London, United Kingdom
- UN Global Platform, New York, United States of America
Meet the SOSCHI Team
The below list shows the core team as at the end of January 2026. It may not include colleagues who worked on earlier phases of the project. We also thank the many contributors across our partner organisations who supported SOSCHI during 2023 to 2025 but were no longer on the project at the time of publication. Finally, we acknowledge the UN Global Platform team, led by Sean Lovell, for their support in developing the Climate and Health Platform.
Expert Advisory Group
EG-ECCS sub-group
UK GSS Environment Theme sub-group members
National User / Advisory Groups
To best access national and local expertise and ensure buy-in from key stakeholders in each partner country, the following groups were set up in Rwanda, Ghana and UK:
- AIMS Advisory Group, Rwanda
- RIPS Steering Group, Ghana
- Government Statistical Service (GSS) Environment Theme sub-group – Health and wellbeing impacts of climate change, UK
These advisory groups provided: expertise on the country-specific context, including their government structure; facilitated data collection; supported environment, climate and health networks; as well as providing technical advice on framework and platform content.