Climate resilience of public health preventive and adaptive measures against diarrhea in Northern Ghana; a case study of the Tamale Metropolitan Area.

BACKGROUND: Diarrhea remains one of the biggest public health threats in Ghana, and it is the most common cause of both morbidity and mortality among children in sub-Sahara Africa. Several preventive and adaptative public health measures such as Rota Virus vaccination and improving access to potable water are being implemented. There is little research in Ghana examining the climatic resilience of these preventative and adaptive interventions. The study aimed at determining whether the preventative and adaptive interventions are climate-resilient by using morbidity data. METHODS: In this research, time series data of monthly all-cause diarrhea morbidity, rainfall, temperature, and relative humidity which span the period of January 2014 to December 2020 were analyzed. The study used the Auto Regression Distributed Lag cointegration approach to model the impact of the climatic variables on all-cause diarrheal morbidity. RESULTS: Public health preventative and adaptation strategies are climate robust and unresponsive to changes in climatic variables. The residuals in the models estimated are white noise and do not exhibit serial autocorrelation or conditional heteroscedasticity. CONCLUSION: In the Tamale Metropolitan Area, climate change has no effect on diarrhea morbidity, supporting the claim that climate resilience is an important component of public health preventive interventions against diarrhea. The study findings as a whole emphasize the significance of climate-sensitive, evidence-based public health strategies.