Strengthening health systems resilience and realizing co-benefits for climate action

Integrating health into climate mitigation and adaptation strategies, helping countries identify actions, and bridging the gap between health systems and climate action.

Overview

The climate crisis is a health crisis. Yet health systems are often marginal to climate planning and policy responses. The Alliance supports research and learning to address this gap, ensuring that health systems are not only able to withstand climate shocks, but also contribute actively to climate solutions.

This work supports countries to identify priorities for climate adaptation and generates evidence to integrate health considerations into climate strategies across sectors such as energy, transport and food systems.

Systems framing

The Alliance approaches climate and health not as a series of emergency or disaster responses, but as a fundamental health systems challenge that requires long-term adaptation and mitigation. Work in this area aims to reposition health systems as active agents of climate action rather than passive recipients of climate impacts.

This systems-level approach focuses on:

• From reaction to mitigation – reframing health systems as contributors to climate change mitigation by generating evidence on pathways to decarbonize health sectors and establish low-carbon models of care;
• Systems thinking for adaptation – applying participatory systems-thinking approaches to support countries in navigating complex adaptation planning, ensuring that national adaptation plans for health are grounded in workforce realities, governance arrangements and financing constraints; and
• The co-benefits lens – examining climate policies through a health equity perspective, identifying the health co-benefits of mitigation actions in non-health sectors, such as improved air quality from sustainable transport, to strengthen the case for cross-sectoral action.

How the Alliance approaches this area

The Alliance’s strategy for 2024–2028 addresses the climate crisis across three interrelated dimensions: