Skip to content

Developing a city-level heat health action plan in Tianjin, China

Categories: Action Line 1: Surveillance and monitoring, Assessments of climate and health risks and GHG emissions, Health and climate research, Integrated risks, monitoring, early warning, and GHG emissions tracking, Health systems wide resilience, Heat and cold

Country: China

Organizations: Lancet Countdown Asia Center

The intervention

Tianjin took the lead in launching a systematic intervention centered on health meteorological services, aiming to reduce the incidence of climate-sensitive diseases, particularly stroke. Through the establishment of a Health-Meteorology Cross-Innovation Center, the municipal government, in collaboration with meteorological, health, and environmental departments, built an interdisciplinary cooperation platform to advance the capacity building of health meteorological services.

Since 2021, Tianjin has issued meteorological risk warnings for strokes associated with cold waves and heatwaves, disseminating information to the public via multiple channels such as SMS, television, new media, and rural loudspeakers. Subsequently, the warning services were upgraded to the “Warning+” model, linking with the Health Commission, community grids, family doctors, traditional Chinese medicine institutions, enterprises, and media science popularization, to provide targeted support for key populations such as the elderly and patients with chronic diseases. At the same time, Tianjin has actively expanded industry cooperation in health meteorology, applying meteorological health warning technologies to smart healthcare, chronic disease prevention and control, traditional Chinese medicine clinical research, and intelligent driving, thereby fostering an integrated development model of industry-academia-research-application.

Today, health meteorological services have expanded beyond stroke to include diseases such as coronary heart disease, asthma, and respiratory infections. By integrating these disease-related meteorological risk forecasts and high-temperature health risk warning products into the early warning component of the China Meteorological Administration's National Early Warning China Solution platform (Multi-hazard Alert Zero-gap and Universal, MAZU), these health risk products can be extended to more regions worldwide.

Success factors

The success of this intervention in Tianjin was driven by the following factors:

  • Multi-Sector Collaboration. Through data sharing and interdisciplinary collaboration among meteorological, health, and environmental sectors, Tianjin has effectively mitigated health risks posed by climate change, significantly reducing the incidence of strokes. Since 2011, data on more than 10 catagories of diseases has been shared across over 70 hospitals citywide. As a result, stroke hospitalizations in winter declined by 0.3-25.1% (3,010 patients) in winter, and by 3.8-24.2% (1,083 patients) in summer.
  • Community Engagement. In response to meteorological risk warnings for strokes, Tianjin has integrated citizen health needs by conducting community screenings to ensure timely coverage of high-risk populations. Early warning products were provided at community level, particularly targeting elderly populations. Warning Information was deliverd to family doctor teams in 264 primary healthcare institutions across all 16 districts, covering 4.97 million residents which include nearly 2.75 million elderly and patients with chronic diseases.
  • Technological Innovation. Tianjin has enhanced its climate resilience by developing innovative health meteorological warning products. AI-based meteorological risk prediction models have been developed for coronary heart disease, COPD, pediatric influenza, asthma, and heatstroke, providing 10-day risk level forecasts at 5 km resolution for the upcoming 48 hours across Tianjin area.
  • Multi-Channel Health Warning Communication. Tianjin has strengthened public awareness of climate risks through a multi-channel health warning communication strategy. More than 100 million stroke risk warning SMS messages have been released, with 110,000 individuals receiving targeted SMS messages. The release of meteorological risk warnings for stroke is estimated to save approximately US$ 8.33 million hospitalization costs in winter and US$ 2.78 million in summer. Preliminary statistics suggest that a total of US$ 27.8 million economic burden was saved from the 25 warnings, covering hospitalization, medical, and both direct and indirect costs.

Recommendations

Replication of Tianjin’s model requires strong collaboration between meteorological, health, and research institutions through formalized data-sharing frameworks. Family doctors, community health workers, and grid systems deliver targeted alerts to vulnerable populations using SMS, mobile applications, and local media. The approach expands coverage from single-disease warnings to cardiovascular, respiratory, and heat-related conditions supported by AI-enabled forecasting. Partnerships with private enterprises integrate these services into digital health and smart-city systems, while active participation in international knowledge-exchange platforms enables other cities to adapt innovations to their own contexts and strengthen preparedness for climate-sensitive health risks.

Key resources

Click here to return to the Belém Health Action Library

Back to Case studies