Climate-Sensitive Health Outcomes in Kenya: A Scoping Review of Environmental Exposures and Health Outcomes Research, 2000 – 2023

Abstract

Climate change threatens health and social development gains in Kenya, necessitating health policy planning for risk reduction and mitigation. To understand the baseline state of knowledge of environmental determinants of health in Kenya relevant to climate change, a comprehensive scoping review was undertaken. Compliant with a pre-registered protocol, nine bibliographic databases and grey literature sources were searched for articles published from 2000-2023. Two-stage screening was conducted on 17,394 articles; 635 full-texts were screened in duplicate. A final 353 articles underwent data extraction for topic categorisation, bibliometric analysis, and narrative summary. This was comprised of 344 (97%) journal articles, 59% of which were published after 2014 (n=207). Main study designs included observational (n=211) and modelling studies (n=64). Health topics centred on vector-borne diseases (41%, n=147), primarily vector abundance (n=102) and malaria (n=60), while injury or death (n=10), mental health conditions (n=7) and heat exposure (n=7) studies were less frequent. Environmental health research in Kenya is largely conducted in the Lake Victoria Basin, Rift Valley and Coastal regions, with fewer studies from the northern arid and semi-arid regions. Findings of this review suggest a growing and diverse field of predominantly observational research with an increasing focus on social determinants and policy-relevant themes, however research on vector-borne disease dwarfs other health outcomes and sparsely populated but climatically fragile regions are less represented in published literature. Addressing existing gaps in baseline evidence underpinning associations between the environment and health outcomes will benefit climate change attribution research and support future development of evidence-informed climate change and health policy in Kenya.