Active Climate, Earth & Environment Public Health & Healthcare

Leveraging health for ambitious national climate action

Funder Wellcome Charity-funded
Recipient organisation United Nations Development Programme
Funding £821K
Period Nov 2025 — Oct 2028

In plain English

AI plain-English summary

The UN is embedding health expertise into national climate plans for at least ten countries, with tailored support on sustainable financing and measurable health commitments due by COP30 in November 2025. This matters because national climate pledges—called Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs)—have historically focused on emissions and energy, largely ignoring the health consequences of climate change. Heatwaves, air pollution, and infectious disease outbreaks are already straining healthcare systems, yet most countries lack the technical capacity to include health targets in their climate strategies. The gap is not a lack of will but a lack of expertise and coordinated support. If successful, the programme will produce a public climate and health dashboard that tracks global progress on health integration across all NDCs, making it possible to compare commitments and hold governments accountable. It will also create a pipeline of best practices shared between countries in the Global South, which could reshape how future UN climate negotiations address health. The immediate change is invisible to most people—it happens inside government planning offices and UN coordination meetings—but it could redirect billions in climate finance toward health infrastructure, from heat-resilient hospitals to disease surveillance systems.

View original technical description
In 2024, the UN Secretary-General called on UNDP to leverage the infrastructure of its Climate Promise to drive coordinated UN-wide support to countries in developing impactful and inclusive nationally determined contributions (NDCs). Health was introduced as a new Climate Promise Action Area in 2024, and support from Wellcome will enable UNDP to ensure health- specific expertise is available to countries as they develop their NDCs and roll-out implementation of commitments. This 3-year proposal aims to deploy health expertise to support countries in identifying actionable and measurable health-related commitments that can be integrated into their NDCs by COP30 (November 2025), and then ensure technical support is provided for implementation. Specifically, a minimum of ten countries will be identified, and tailored support will be provided including on sustainable financing of health commitments. This will be done in coordination with WHO, NDC Partnership, and others, to ensure alignment of climate and health efforts and investments. The proposed programme will also develop a climate and health dashboard to track global progress on health integration in the NDCs building on the existing Climate Promise Tracker. South-South learning and sharing of best practices, will help inform future NDCs and ongoing UNFCCC processes and negotiations relevant to health.

View the original record at the funder ↗

Researchers

Natalia Linou (EPMC Awardee)

Related Research

Grants with similar aims, by meaning.

Catalysing Evidence-Based Climate Policy through Health-Centred Action
Building the Climate Change and Health Field: Placing Health at the Centre of the Global Climate Negotiations
Catalysing South Africa’s G20 Climate-Health Leadership and Aligning with Brazil’s COP30 Agenda
Equipping Climate Negotiators to Place Health Evidence at the Heart of Climate Negotiations
World Health Organization / Wellcome Trust strategic collaboration on Climate change and Health 2024-2028

Original classification

Discretionary Award

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