Resourcing Climate and Health Priorities - Mapping of International Finance Flows, 2018-2022

The impacts of the climate crisis are being felt around the world as people lose their families, communities, lands, and livelihoods. Every fraction of warming compounds this suffering, and the cost of inaction will ultimately be measured in human lives. It is estimated that climate change could result in 14.5–15.6 million deaths between 2026 and 2050. 

Countries are planning for the threat climate change poses to health and finance – both domestic and international – and must ensure their efforts keep up to meet these needs. Delivering a sustainable, resilient world is an immensely complex and expensive task. Fractured and inefficient funding is preventing communities around the world from responding effectively to the growing health risks posed by climate change. Previous estimates have found that just 6% of adaptation funding and 0.5% of multilateral climate funding are allocated to health sector projects. Countries remain woefully under-resourced to protect human health and wellbeing, to build more resilient health systems, and to respond to the climate crisis. 

Averting climate disaster and fortifying health systems demands a rapid scale up of financing through coordinated mobilization of public and private funds at a scale never before seen. Diverse solutions, both within and outside the health sector, are required to protect health from climate impacts, necessitating coordinated and cross-sectoral finance. The scale of this crisis requires financing institutions to work differently to avoid the ‘zero sum game’ approach that often plagues the global health and development sectors, and in turn creates even more entrenched siloes. Increased resource mobilization to secure additional financing will be critical to deliver on making the world a safer place for both people and planet. 

This report provides the most comprehensive analysis to date of the levels and trends in self-reported financing for climate and health, and provides a critical baseline understanding from which countries, funders, implementers, and advocates can work to strengthen financing for climate and health. 

To enable the quantification and tracking of funding, this report conceptualizes climate and health finance primarily as international concessional financing commitments, in and outside of the health sector, that: 

1. Address the direct health impacts of climate change, 

2. Support the health sector to adapt to and mitigate climate change, and 

3. Generate health co-benefits from climate action.