Given the global policy focus on the potential health effects of climate change driven by rising levels of greenhouse gases, and consequently temperature, we will add temperature and precipitation as risk factors that are quantified on an annual basis in future iterations of GBD. Even though most of the potential harm that might come from rising temperatures or extreme weather events will occur in the future, in some locations, we might already find significant attributable burden.73 This analysis will need to examine the relationship between disease and mortality risk and temperature for each relevant outcome. For some outcomes, these relationships are likely to be U shaped, with an optimal temperature for minimum risk. These U-shaped relationships could mean that for some outcomes in some locations, rising temperature might reduce harm, even if in most locations it will increase burden. Likewise, a major issue in understanding the temperature and health outcome relationships is that we would expect these to be attenuated in high-SDI settings, where many individuals can protect themselves from some of the consequences. In other words, generalising from studies in high-SDI locations to other locations might underestimate the risk relationships.
