Climate

Background: The climate impacts of health professionals’ work are significant. The potential role and opportunities for regulators of health professionals’ work to drive behavioural and practice change have not been adequately explored in the literature. The objective of this research was to examine regulators’ perspectives on the potential role of health professions’ regulatory bodies in advancing the adoption of climate-conscious professional practice. Methods: Semi-structured interviews with 19 regulators overseeing the practice of health professionals in medicine, nursing, pharmacy, and dentistry in Canada were undertaken. Constant comparative data analysis using nVivo v15 was undertaken to identify common themes. The COREQ framework was applied to ensure the quality of the research processes used. Results: Participants highlighted their belief that there are only limited opportunities for health professions’ regulators to lead climate-positive practice change, despite their personal beliefs in the importance of the topic. The use of educational approaches, rather than legal or regulatory tools, was emphasized. Concerns were raised regarding regulatory overreach, practitioner blowback, and practical/logistical considerations. Coalition building across different facets of a profession (including educational institutions, unions, workplaces, and professional/advocacy groups) was identified as potentially most impactful. Conclusions: Previous research had highlighted practitioners’ beliefs that regulators had significant legal and practice-directed levers that could drive behavioural change towards more climate-friendly health care work. This research has highlighted regulators’ discomfort with assuming a legalistic role. Instead, they favoured persuasive techniques such as education and coalition building that may nudge, rather than compel, practitioners towards more climate-friendly practice.

Deep learning models for atmospheric pattern recognition require spatially consistent training labels that align precisely with input meteorological fields. This study introduces an automatic cold front detection method using the ERA5 reanalysis dataset from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) at 850 hPa, specifically designed to generate physically consistent labels for machine learning applications. The approach combines the Thermal Front Parameter (TFP) with temperature advection (AdvT), applying optimized thresholds (TFP < 5 × 10⁻¹¹ K m⁻²; AdvT < −1 × 10⁻⁴ K s⁻¹), morphological filtering, and polynomial smoothing. Comparison against 1426 manual charts from 2009 revealed systematic spatial displacement, with mean offsets of ~502 km. Although pixel-level overlap was low, with Intersection over Union (IoU) = 0.013 and Dice coefficient (Dice) = 0.034, spatial concordance exceeded 99%, confirming both methods identify the same synoptic systems. The automatic method detects 58% more fronts over the South Atlantic and 44% fewer over the Andes compared to manual charts. Seasonal variability shows maximum activity in austral winter (31.3%) and minimum in summer (20.1%). This is the first automatic front detection system calibrated for South America that maintains direct correspondence between training labels and reanalysis input fields, addressing the spatial misalignment problem that limits deep learning applications in atmospheric sciences.

This study analyzes more than a century of hourly meteorological data (1901–2024) from the Thissio station in central Athens, Greece, to assess the long-term changes in human thermal discomfort. Three simple and widely used bioclimatic indices, Thom’s Discomfort Index (TDI), Humidex (HMDX), and Heat Index (HI), were calculated to capture the combined effects of air temperature and humidity. The results show a marked increase in the frequency, intensity, and duration of thermal discomfort since the 1980s, with a strong acceleration after 2000. The number of days with severe or dangerous heat stress has more than doubled compared with the mid-20th century, and periods of high discomfort now extend from June to September. The maximum values of HMDX and HI have exceeded critical health thresholds, highlighting increasing risks for the urban population. These findings demonstrate how rising temperature and humidity amplify heat stress in a Mediterranean city and emphasize the need for adaptation strategies in urban planning and public health to reduce vulnerability to extreme heat.