AlphaEarth Satellite Embeddings for Modelling Climate Sensitive Diseases Towards Global Health Resilience
For global health researchers, this work demonstrates that satellite embeddings can modestly improve disease prediction but are not yet a breakthrough, with incremental gains and unresolved data constraints.
The paper evaluates AlphaEarth satellite embeddings for predicting malaria, respiratory infection, and stunting in low-resource settings, finding R² gains of 0.049 for respiratory infection across 11 countries but neutral results for stunting due to data limitations.
Malaria, childhood acute respiratory infection, and child undernutrition together account for over two million deaths annually in children under five, with the burden concentrated in low and middle-income countries where climate variability modulates transmission, exposure, and nutritional outcomes. Routine health surveillance in these settings remains sparse and reactive. Satellite-derived representations of the Earth's surface offer a scalable, low-cost complement to traditional covariates, yet their utility as predictors of population health outcomes is poorly characterised. We summarise findings from three studies evaluating AlphaEarth Foundations 64-dimensional satellite embeddings as predictors of population health outcomes, focusing on vulnerable populations. The studies span infectious disease (malaria, respiratory infection) and stunting. In each study, embeddings provide predictive value at sufficient spatial granularity: (i) malaria prediction across Nigeria shows consistent per-region R^2 gains; (ii) childhood acute respiratory infection prediction across 11 DHS countries increases pooled R^2 from 0.157 to 0.206 across three tree-based estimators; (iii) stunting prediction across 35 countries is neutral at country level due to collinearity with fixed effects. The stunting case is currently limited by lack of DHS cluster-level coordinates, which is the next key experiment.