Advanced operationalization framework for climate-resilient urban public health care services

Abstract

Conventional local public health planning and monitoring are insufficiently addressing the conjugated impact of urban development change and climate change in the future. The existing checklist and index often ignore the spatial-network interaction determining urban public health services in forward-looking aspects. This study offers and demonstrates a climate-resilient operationalization framework for urban public health services considering the interaction between urban development change and climate change across scales. A combination of collaborative scenario planning and tailor-made composite indicators were applied based on the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report (AR5)’s climate risk concept to adhere to local realities and diverse sets of scenarios. The framework was contested in a medium-sized city with a universal health care coverage setting, Khon Kaen city, Thailand. The results show that the coupling of collaborative scenario planning and composite indicators allows local public health care to operationalize their potential impact and climate-resilient targets in the future(s) in multiple service operation aspects. The scenarios assessment outcomes prove that although public health devotion can be fail-safe, achieving climate-resilient targets requires sectoral integration with urban development and health determining domains. Further exploration and disputation of the framework with a wider scale and diversified settings are recommended to enhance their robustness and universality.