The Climate and Global Health Initiative's regional observatory network continues to take shape across four key regions. Here's a brief update on where things stand and what's ahead.
Observatory Development
Our four observatories — North Carolina, the Amazon Basin, East Africa, and Southeast Asia — are at different stages of development, but all are making progress on the core goals of integrating climate and health data, building local partnerships, and developing shared research infrastructure.
North Carolina
As Duke's home state, North Carolina serves as our primary development and testing environment for climate-health data methods. We're actively building data pipelines that link weather station networks, air quality monitoring, and health surveillance data. The methods and tools developed here are designed to scale to our international sites.
East Africa
Our East Africa observatory builds on DGHI's deep partnerships in Kenya, Tanzania, and Madagascar. The Climate+ project with Kilimanjaro Christian Medical Centre in Moshi, Tanzania, is actively investigating climate-driven fungal disease threats — one of the first concrete research outputs of the observatory network.
Amazon Basin and Southeast Asia
Our Amazon and Southeast Asia observatories are in earlier stages, focused on partnership development, data inventory, and aligning climate exposure data with health outcome surveillance systems.
Cross-Cutting Progress
Across all sites, we're making progress on shared infrastructure:
- Expanding the climate-health data inventory (now over 120 cataloged datasets)
- Developing and refining the
weathertoolsanddataplaneR packages - Building reproducible data processing workflows that work across observatory sites
Get Involved
We're actively looking for collaborators across all four observatory regions. If you're a researcher, institution, or organization working at the intersection of climate and health in any of these regions, we'd love to hear from you.
Visit the Contact CGHI page to start a conversation. Messages submitted there are routed to the appropriate team member.