Overview

The Climate Change and Human Health Literature Portal is a knowledge management tool for individuals who want to find the most relevant scientific literature on the health implications of climate change. It provides access to a database of studies published between 2007 and 2019. The National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) developed the portal after receiving feedback from academic and public health stakeholders that it was often difficult to access the most relevant studies on climate change and health because of the many disciplines and journals involved in the field. The project grew from NIEHS' efforts to support the US Global Change Research Program's Third National Climate Assessment (NCA) through development of a Health Sector Bibliography as a technical input for the Health Chapter of the NCA. This portal is an effort to make that database accessible to a global audience and in an updated form on an ongoing basis.

Audience

The portal includes references for studies about the health impacts associated with exposures to climate variability (e.g., heat, extreme precipitation) and climate change (e.g., changing seasonality, longer term temperature changes). Scientific literature on the health impacts of weather-related natural disasters is also included, as are studies of related issues such as health benefits of actions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, health adaptation, and resilience of health care facilities to extreme weather and climate events.