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Climate change and epidemiological transitions: Evidence from Antananarivo, Madagascar

Jordan Klein, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (MPIDR)
Jessica Metcalf, Princeton University

Global climate change poses grave risks to population health in the developing world through threatening the sustainability of nascent epidemiological transitions and raising the prospects for counter transitions driven by indirect climate impacts on mortality, such as those from re-emerging climate-driven infectious diseases, and by the direct physical impacts of extreme climatic events. Taking Antananarivo, Madagascar as a case study, we draw on death registration, precipitation, and temperature time series spanning over 4 decades and use generalized additive models to investigate how the relationships between climate, enteric infection mortality, and mortality from all other causes have changed as the city has progressed through different epidemiological transition stages. Controlling for seasonality, year-on-year changes, and autocorrelation, while we find that enteric infection mortality has become less climate sensitive over time and mortality from remaining causes exhibits little climatic variation, enteric disease mortality risk has increased following flooding in recent years. While these findings raise concerns of a potential counter transition from re-emerging enteric infections as climate change increases the frequency and severity of floods in Antananarivo, the relationship between climate change and epidemiological transitions remains insufficiently well-understood and warrants further study in more climatically diverse environments looking at additional causes of death.

Keywords: Environmental studies, Mortality, Civil Registration and Vital Statistics (CRVS), Theory

No extended abstract or paper available

  Presented in Session P15.