Adverse Weather and Health Plan
The Adverse Weather and Health Plan (AWHP) aims to protect individuals and communities from the health effects of adverse weather and to build community resilience.
Applies to England
CCHS navigation menu:
CCHS homepage
Topic: climate-related hazards
Hazard: all climate-related hazards, heat
Resources for AWHP:
-
Summary - Adverse Weather and Health Plan
-
Adverse Weather and Health Plan equity review and impact assessment
More content:
Summary
The AWHP is supports local and national organisations to prepare, build and respond to future adverse weather events. It protects lives and promotes health and wellbeing in order to:
- prevent the increase in years of life lost due to adverse weather events
- prevent mortality due to adverse weather events
- prevent morbidity due to adverse weather events
- reduce the use of healthcare services due to adverse weather events
The Plan builds on the previous Heatwave Plan for England and the Cold Weather Plan for England.
The 4 components of the plan
Figure 1. The 4 components of the AWHP
The AWHP programme of work contains:
- the plan itself
- the supporting evidence document (SED) published in parallel, which is a summary of the scientific evidence supporting the Plan
- the guidance and support materials, available in GOV.UK and listed in Appendices 2 to 4 (Appendix 2 (heat), Appendix 3 (cold), Appendix 4 (flood and drought)
- the Weather-Health Alerting (WHA) system (heat and cold), developed in collaboration with the Met Office
The plan seeks to address nine action areas. Local organisations and partnerships can use these to develop local health and resilience plans outlining how they will protect their local populations from the health impacts of adverse weather events.
- Service delivery
- Capacity building
- Organisation arrangements
- Communication
- Risk management
- Early warning systems
- Research and data analysis
- Quality assurance
- Policy development and accountability