Emily Injete Amondo

• Environmental and climate change
• Gender
• New Technologies
• Health

• Kenya
• Uganda
• Zambia

Climate Variability and Health Adaptation: Effects on Human Health Outcomes, Food security and Welfare

Despite noteworthy improvements in life expectancy across the world, the number of year’s people live with disabilities and illness have increased overtime. Nevertheless, climate change has already contributed to the rising food hunger in many regions in the recent past and could possibly reverse improvements in disease burden reduction and impede attainment of development goals. East Africa is one of the disaster-prone and highly vulnerable sub-region in SSA with high uncertainties surrounding future weather conditions. This has substantial effects on socio-economic welfare of households and human health, especially children who bear the huge burden of the resulting diseases. Gender-wise, apparently women are not only unequally affected by health risks, but also bear the additional work burden resulting from these health risks, given their decisive role as caregivers and custodians of other household members and food consumption. This in-turn compromises their engagement in productive socio-economic activities which further exacerbates their vulnerability given that majority possess low factor endowment and have low socio-economic status. Without effective preparedness and adaptation policies for disaster risk reduction and building people’s resilience with a gender perspective, future human welfare is at greater risk given that the sub-region had the highest prevalence rate of undernourishment (31.6%) in 2016 in the world.

In view of the above, the current research will address the following research questions (i) How do weather extremes and variability affect human health for rural households? (ii) Do climate induced health outcomes affect household income, food and non-food consumption and poverty of rural households? (iii) What are the costs and benefits of climate change health adaptation interventions at macroeconomic level? Furthermore, the determinants of household health adaptation interventions including risk preferences will be explored. Mixed methods research design will be employed and data drawn from secondary as well as primary data sources to fully address the research questions in both Kenya and Uganda.