Putting Our Network on the Map

“What can we do together that we can’t do alone?” as Angela Okune, a founding member of CSID, would often pose when the network was forming. It’s one question our team of five kept coming back to. Six months in, here is what we’ve been building.

How we started

We had started with a name. We even had a network built around it. But ask any two members to define “climate sensitive infectious disease,” you’d likely walk away with two different answers. This gap is the reason our Atlas working group exists.

We spent the first few months reading widely, drawing on disease atlases that others had built, and slowly shaping a common understanding we could all work from. This quarter, we pushed forward on three fronts: sharpening our definition of a climate-sensitive infectious disease, building a first interactive prototype of the Atlas, and speaking with experts to test our thinking. The Atlas won’t just be something we’re building for the network. It is something we’re building with it.

Defining a climate-sensitive disease

We started with a clear, shared definition that the rest of the project could build on. The definition works in three tiers, each relying on the last. 

At its heart is a simple idea: a disease is climate-sensitive when its spread, distribution, or severity is shaped by a changing climate. It gets more nuanced from there: climate rarely acts alone; it works through a chain of biological, environmental, and social factors that decide who is exposed and who falls ill. The final tier makes the definition operational: a practical set of criteria that the network can apply to future work, starting with our Atlas.

It is still a work in progress, and some of the most interesting questions are still open: how far to follow those social and behavioral factors, and how to handle borderline cases, especially diseases only beginning to emerge.

Figure 1: Members in action, coordinating across five countries, with Rithika presenting on the process for defining CSID

An early design for the Atlas

From definition, we moved to practice and built our first interactive prototype in May. The Atlas maps where our members work, what diseases we work on, and what expertise we all bring to the network. Our Atlas to draw on both scientific evidence and lived experience equally, recognizing that knowledge takes many forms. On our Atlas, visitors can find members across the world, spot a researcher working on the same disease, discover complementary expertise, and uncover new opportunities to collaborate. 

We want our Atlas to last. So alongside building it, we’ve been collecting ideas for how to keep it alive, owned and maintained by the network collectively beyond our working group.

Figure 2: Envisioning our Atlas, an early version

Insights from speaking with the experts

We spent May and June interviewing specialists across epidemiology, climate science, data science, and disease modeling. They joined from the UK, Japan, Laos, Thailand, South Africa, and Argentina, a deliberately wide spread for a project meant to work in different settings.

Two things came through clearly. The first was a shared sense that climate and social conditions both belong in the picture, which reassured us the definition is on the right track. The second was the energy around collaboration: most had joined the network to find others working on the same problems, and were most drawn to an Atlas that could surface funding gaps, researcher profiles, and chances to work together.

Looking ahead

There is plenty still to do, and most of it we would rather do together. Next quarter, we will move from prototype to building the Atlas, finalize the plan to keep it running after the working group ends, and join forces with the network’s other working groups. Some of us will attend the regional events, where we hope to showcase the group and create a few moments that stick. Alongside that, data collection continues, with more interviews and pilot demonstrations, so we keep hearing from everyone. Our email inbox is open for inquiries and interest, please reach out to us at [email protected].