Digital map of Australia’s environmental health vulnerabilities

• The AusEnHealth map for the public, policy makers, health managers, researchers to access environmental health date in one place
• Users will be able to visualise and analyse environmental data on rising temperatures, increasing CO2 emissions, extreme weather

Co-lead researcher Dr Aiden Price from QUT’s Centre for Data Science  and the School of Mathematical Sciences said the funding would support the continued development of the Australian Environmental Health (AusEnHealth) platform.

“AusEnHealth will enable policy makers, planners, health managers, researchers and the public to access, visualise and analyse environmental health data,” Dr Price said.

“This will enable them to identify vulnerable populations, predict the future disease burden, and plan for a changing climate.”

Dr Price said AusEnHealth was being designed to communicate how different areas were vulnerable to rising temperatures, extreme weather events, increasing CO2 emissions, and social inequalities to make the data more transparent for the public and to make it easier for policy makers to act.

“While a lot of data on this type of information exists, data sets are often fragmented, incomplete, and siloed, making it an extremely difficult and time-consuming process for any decision maker to get this data, let alone analyse it,” he said.

“It will speed up access to data for decision-making on, for example, climate mitigation and adaptation strategies such as access to cooler places, or cooling hubs.

“For members of the public, there will be the evidence for them to see, for example, that their area has a high heat risk and take mitigation steps.

“For example, people who are acclimatised to higher temperatures, such as Darwin dwellers, may have a lower risk of heat stress at, say 35 degrees Celsius, compared to those living in Hobart.”

Co-lead Professor Kerrie Mengersen, from QUT’s Centre for Data Science, said the funding of phase two of the AusEnHealth project would go toward updates of the platform’s infrastructure and its public release.

“Our methodology involves extensive data collection, integration, and analysis, using modern statistical approaches to create environmental health indicators and population vulnerability indices,” Professor Mengersen said.

“With this funding, we will integrate new climate and air pollution data sets, some of which will be in real-time, and expand on other environmental health domains such as mosquito-borne diseases.

“We will also develop new analytical capabilities to improve decision-making support.”

(Image from left: Professor Kerrie Mengersen, Dr Aiden Price)

The research was conducted through a collaborative effort involving multiple partners, including QUT, the Australian Urban Research Infrastructure Network (AURIN), the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW), FrontierSI, and various government agencies such as the Western Australian Department of Health and the Environmental Protection Agency Victoria.

QUT Media contacts:

Niki Widdowson 07 3138 2999 or n.widdowson@qut.edu.au

After hours: 0407 585 901 or media@qut.edu.au.