On the Use of Synthetic Populations to Assess Health Risks of Complex Disasters

Abstract

The pathways from climate change and related disasters to health outcomes can be conceptualized as direct (primary) or indirect (secondary or tertiary). How these pathways impact the health of a given population are the result of complex interactions between climate-induced forcing functions, non-climatic environmental risk factors, community socio-economic structures and processes, and the health attitudes and behaviors of individuals and groups. These interactions vary by place and over time to create a complex mosaic of health risks. To address the complexity of the consequences of climate change across space and time, planning and policy approaches have typically used post-hoc analyses and have extrapolated relationships temporally without the ability in most instances to account for new contextual conditions at a place.The focus of this handbook chapter is to describe and illustrate how agent-based modeling of synthetic populations could be used to create reasonable scenarios of current and future health risks associated with climate change and related disasters. As an example of the utility of the platform, the chapter provides an estimate of extreme heat exposures of individuals in one region of the United States. Additionally, it gives examples of further applications of synthetic population modeling for assessing health risks following an acute natural disaster, such as a hurricane or earthquake.