Data needs for accelerating research at the intersection of climate stressors and health: an online survey

Assessing the health impacts of climate stressors is challenging due to the inherently interdisciplinary nature of the effort and the complexity of data, methods, and software involved. We surveyed researchers who published in the climate and health space to identify major barriers to using and sharing climate and health data and code resources. Participants were identified using a PubMed query to return articles related to research in the field of climate and health. Using the PubMed API, we scraped email addresses for authors of matching published articles. 9195 authors were emailed a link to the online survey instrument, which took approximately 7 min to complete. We had an 11.8% response rate resulting in 1041 useable responses. Respondents were from over 75 different countries with only 16.4% working with US populations and were evenly represented between early, mid, and established career. The most desired resources were analysis-ready datasets and educational materials on data management and analysis. Personal constraints such as lack of time were a major barrier to sharing data or code. Our survey results suggest that investment in data creation as a professional service, knowledge sharing and collaboration, and research infrastructure will be enthusiastically adopted and help to accelerate the pace of research to practice.