Analyzing novel crowdsourced data sources and their role in understanding health outcomes of climate change-driven disasters

• Social media platforms are used as crowdsourced data sources for health risk detection and monitoring during climate change-driven disasters. • Scoping review of 34 U.S. based studies from 2010 to 2024 provided novel insights on the value of social media in understanding health risks during disasters. • The review identified four key themes of the existing literature: Health Concerns, Affected Populations, Disaster Response, and Environment. • Health disparities and geographic inequalities are rarely assessed in current studies. Climate change has increased the frequency and severity of natural disasters that pose significant mental and physical health risks to the public during and after the event. Simultaneously, the dependency on social media to provide real-time information on how a disaster unfolds has also grown. We performed a scoping review using the Arksey and O’Malley framework to identify how crowdsourced data from social media platforms from the year 2010 to 2024 can be used to understand health outcomes during climate change-driven natural disasters in the United States. We reviewed thirty-four peer-reviewed articles using an interdisciplinary multi-method approach of human-machine collaboration. Two key research questions guided the review: (1) How is social media used to inform early warning systems for public health risks during climate-related disasters? and (2) Do social media indicators reflect disparities in health outcomes across different populations and geographic regions in such disaster events? The scoping review revealed four dominant thematic areas where the value of social media has been demonstrated: Health Concerns, Affected Populations, Disaster Impact & Response, and Environmental Factors. Social media platforms have frequently supported early warning efforts and detection of health risks, offering real-time insights into public perceptions and changing situations on the ground. Our findings highlight the value of social media as a complementary tool for real-time surveillance of disaster situations and public health response. The insights from social media can support timely action by public health officials, emergency services, nonprofits, and volunteers to plan and act efficiently during disaster response and relief. Future research should focus on extracting granular health-related information from social media data to enhance disaster response effectiveness and support for affected communities. Graphical abstract to visually summarize the study’s methodology that employs human-machine collaboration for an integrated approach to extract and analyze the themes of existing literature and how the key themes can inform social media-based early warning systems for risk detection and health disparity mapping during climate-related disasters.