How does climate adaptation affect infectious disease risk?
Describe an adaptation measure, a location, and a sector. DSCAdapt analyses the co-benefits and trade-offs using IDAlert's curated evidence base.
Or start with a common scenario
Currently in the evidence base
Evaluate a policy document
Upload or paste an adaptation strategy, project plan, or policy brief. DSCAdapt flags where the evidence base links a measure in it to an infectious-disease risk the document does not appear to address.
Sessions & export
Every scenario analysis session is saved locally. Open a past session or export as PDF.
Evidence base
A comprehensive analysis of ecological and biological scientific research, climate policies, adaptation practices, and latest health literature and data to construct risk pathways between climate measures and infectious disease outcomes.
Pathway explorer
Trace how climate adaptation measures connect to infectious disease risk. Start with a policy sector — each selection reveals the next column in the chain.
Pathways, not predictions.
DSCAdapt is a retrieval-augmented language tool for European policymakers working on climate adaptation. It reasons in terms of pathways — the ecological and infrastructural mechanisms that link a given measure to disease transmission, exposure, or vulnerability — rather than generating forecasts or recommendations.
Every claim is tied back to the IDAlert evidence base or current web sources through explicit references. The tool uses conditional language because these are plausible scenarios shaped by local context, not deterministic outcomes. Where evidence is thin or conflicting, the tool says so.
Who it is for
Municipal and national climate adaptation officers, public health policy leads, and researchers across the IDAlert consortium.
What it isn't
Not medical advice. Not epidemiological surveillance. Not a substitute for local expertise. An evidence-synthesis tool meant to sit alongside those sources.
How a question becomes an answer.
Five stages: a routing model classifies the question, retrieval pulls relevant evidence, an optional web-search agent gathers current context, a generation model synthesises the response, and the output is rendered or exported.
Classify
Rewrites follow-ups, enforces scope, picks retrieval paths. Out-of-scope queries redirected before generation.
Pull evidence
Hybrid cosine (85%) + IDF keyword (15%), deduplicates per section, returns top-k chunks with references.
Current conditions
Web-search agent pulls supplementary current legislation, policy, or geographic context. Kept separate from curated evidence.
Synthesise
Generation model produces the response against a system prompt enforcing scope, citations, and the co-benefit/trade-off split.
Read or export
Responses in chat or exported as formatted PDF briefings with references preserved.
What it will and won't do.
Surface co-benefits and trade-offs
Reasons through both positive and negative implications for infectious disease risk, with references.
Predict outbreaks
A retrieval-augmented language system, not a forecasting model.
Work in multiple EU languages
Responses are returned in the language of the query.
Give medical advice
Operates at the population and policy level, not the clinical level.
Acknowledge its own gaps
Where the evidence base doesn't cover a topic, the tool says so explicitly.
Make recommendations
Lays out evidence and trade-offs. The judgement belongs to policymakers.
Cite its sources
Every response includes a reference list tracing claims back to pathway documents or web sources.
Replace local expertise
Epidemiological judgement and ground knowledge from public health authorities remain essential.
Built at LSE under IDAlert.
DSCAdapt is developed at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, London School of Economics, as part of the IDAlert project (Infectious Disease decision-support tools and Alert systems), funded by the European Union's Horizon Europe research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 101057554.
The tool is part of IDAlert's Work Package 2, which focuses on indicators for monitoring climate-induced infectious disease risk and emergence. The wider consortium includes 18 partner institutions across seven EU member states, plus the United Kingdom and Bangladesh.
For access, collaboration enquiries, or bug reports: s.aggarwal28@lse.ac.uk · The tool is in research preview and access is currently limited to IDAlert consortium members and invited European policymakers.