SOSCHI — UN Climate-Health Platform & climatehealth R Package

Overview

SOSCHI (Standards for Official Statistics on Climate-Health Interactions) is a £5m Wellcome Trust-funded programme hosted on the UN Global Platform. As Technical Lead, I lead the platform engineering and the open-source statistical tooling that operationalises the SOSCHI methods for national statistical offices worldwide.

In March 2026, the SOSCHI methods were endorsed by the United Nations Statistical Commission at its 57th session in New York for inclusion in the Global Set of Environment and Climate Change Statistics.

My Role

Technical Lead — own the platform engineering across services, APIs, deployment, monitoring, and maintenance.
Lead maintainer, platform developer, and corresponding author of the climatehealth R package, published on CRAN.
Manage the project’s GitHub workspace, RAP standards, code review process, pre-commit hooks, unit testing, and pull-request templates.

What the climatehealth Package Does

climatehealth operationalises six climate-health indicators endorsed by the UN Statistical Commission:

Temperature-related mortality
Wildfire smoke exposure mortality
Air pollution health effects
Suicides related to extreme heat
Malaria
Diarrhoeal disease outcomes

Implemented methods include:

Distributed lag non-linear models (DLNM)
Quasi-Poisson time-series regression
Case-crossover analysis
Bayesian spatio-temporal models using INLA
Multivariate meta-analysis for sub-national estimates

Platform Engineering

Backend: Flask web application with API endpoints exposing the climatehealth workflows.
Service layer: data ingestion (Copernicus ERA5, OpenAQ), search, indicator pipelines.
Deployment: Dockerised services, Kubernetes orchestration, monitoring, and migration tooling.
A parallel Rust reimplementation (climatehealth-rs) of core algorithms for performance benchmarking.
A JavaScript data explorer (data_explorer_js) for interactive visualisation.

International Collaboration

Bi-weekly engineering meetings with partners in Ghana and Rwanda.
Monthly Expert Advisory Group and Topic Expert Group meetings with international researchers.
Weekly catchups with the UN technical team to review code/package updates prior to deployment on the UN Global Platform.