Moses Chapa Kiti: Securing our health amidst climate change
Moses Chapa Kiti explores how climate change impacts population health and health systems in Kenya. The multidisciplinary project examines policy gaps, facility readiness, vulnerability of populations, community perspectives, and economic costs, aiming to inform pragmatic, community-informed interventions that build resilient health systems in the face of climate adverse weather events.
My name is Dr Moses Chapa Kiti and I work at the KEMRI Wellcome Trust Research Programme based in Nairobi. Our research area is on population health, health systems and understanding how these are affected by climate change.
Our current project is focusing on how adverse weather events affect our population and our health systems. So, we're looking at this across five multi-disciplinary aspects. The first is looking at policy analysis, understanding the gaps that are there in response systems. Second is looking at how ready are our health facilities whenever they're affected by climate change or adverse weather events. Third is looking at vulnerability of populations and these health facilities to adverse weather events. And fourth, we’re also trying to understand the community perspectives on how they view climate change, how it's affecting them and what they think are important for them in terms of mitigation. And lastly is to understand the economic angle of it - so how do we better respond in terms of economic and finances to these climate adverse weather events.
We have three big questions. One of them first is to understand how climate is affecting the population health, because this is really a new field for us. Second is to understand what is the cost of doing nothing as compared to cost of doing something. So, if an adverse weather event happens in the community, how do they react? How are they affected and what does this mean to the health system that serve these populations?
A key thing is when adverse weather events happen, for example, people tend to get cut off from these health facilities. So, if you do understand how we can better prepare these facilities to mitigate against the adverse weather events, then we will be able to know how better we can serve our populations. And I think most importantly is understanding what the populations really think are priorities for them, so that we can highlight this and keep this in mind whenever we are designing interventions that can be pragmatic to the populations that are served with the health facilities.
Climate change is happening. I think we can see the consequences of this, and one of the sectors that is not really looked into, especially in our African settings, is on the impact on health and health systems. So, I think that when we work on our research, we'll be able to answer fundamental questions on how is climate affecting the populations and the health systems, and how we can better prepare for these risks, and design mitigation measures that are pragmatic and are responsive to make more resilient health systems.
This interview was recorded in September 2025.
This research has been funded by the NIHR (NIHR204850) using UK international development funding from the UK Government to support global health research. The views expressed in this publication are those of the author(s) and not necessarily those of the NIHR or the UK government.