Our vision is to champion social and ecological justice by improving awareness and understanding of the relationship between methane and health outcomes, improving access to health services for adaptation, and providing opportunities to support research ecosystems in data scarce regions.
Our aim is to pilot an integrated data platform (ME-NET) for regions with varying environmental and health data availability and quality, and with varying sources of methane super-emitters for, a) developing data synthesis approaches that are globally applicable, and b) training methane ‘early warning’ models that are robust to regional contexts.
Our research explores:
- To what extent can Deep Learning be used to develop an ozone early warning system that incorporates health data in two regions of the world with higher/lower/middle income, reflecting wider global variation in data availability and quality?
- What are the most relevant health measures for exploring physical and mental health emergencies associated with methane and ozone concentrations in two regions, and is it viable to us Deep Learning to predict rates of emergencies associated with air quality?
- What mobile phone and web-based application user functions would improve the visibility of climate change impacts, and how deliverable are these, given data availability and quality in regions?
Read more about our methodology here.
Our approach involves multi-region co-production with members of the public, patients, lived experience experts, colleagues from wide-ranging academic disciplines, private sectors, and public organisations in the UK and Ghana. The ME-NET prototype has been co-designed and developed with UK-based NGO Common Knowledge, including ongoing Stakeholder Engagement Board meetings with representatives from the UK Met Office, Ghana Meteorological Agency, UK Health Security Agency, University of Ghana, University of Lincoln, Every-One, Lincoln Institute of Rural and Coastal Health, East Midlands Ambulance Service NHS Trust, Centre4, Healthwatch, Lincolnshire County Council, North East Lincolnshire County Council, Lincolnshire Integrated Care Board, Lincolnshire Partnership Foundation NHS Trust, Princess Marie Louise Hospital (Ghana), in addition to NGO representatives, community members, nurses, respiratory and mental health specialists.
Our funding:
The ME-NET project is funded by the Wellcome Trust Data Science Ideathon Climate and Health Award. Our team was short-listed to attend the Ideathon event at Wellcome Trust in July, 2023.