Three Fundamentals for Climate and the Future of Health
Takeaways from The Conduit’s Climate and the Future of Health event
As part of London Climate Action Week, on 22 June, Climate and the Future of Health brought together practitioners, policymakers, and researchers at The Conduit in London for a discussion that felt eerily well-timed. The event took place during the hottest June on record in the British capital, with significant disruptions to public transport, school hours, and daily life. This opening irony quickly gave way to a more serious point: climate change is no longer a distant environmental concern. It is a present-day public health issue, and one that is already reshaping how cities, health systems, and communities must respond.
London, my home, is having to start adapting to the heat. Just last week, the Mayor launched the capital’s first heat plan, Heat Ready London, setting out a city-wide approach to protecting Londoners from extreme heat. As our Deputy Mayor for Environment and Energy, Mete Coban MBE, noted in his remarks at the event, in a city where heat, pollution, and inequality intersect so sharply, this signals a broader shift: climate adaptation can no longer sit at the edge of public health policy but has to move much closer to the center.
The timeliness of The Conduit’s event amplified the poignancy of the conversations. Three takeaways stood out for me. First, the event underscored just how important investment in public health adaptation and resilience is as a first line of defense against the climate crisis. Second, it underscored that climate and health will only advance if governments, philanthropy, civil society, academia, health professionals, and the private sector each play their part. Third, it highlighted the urgent need for improved data flows and stronger evidence to ensure that climate services for health can shape policy in practice.
Climate financing needs to remain adaptive and responsive to rapid shocks
The most glaring thread running through the day for me was the centrality of resilience to current conversations on climate services for health. Climate is affecting public health in more immediate and dangerous ways than it has in the recent past, from extreme heat and air pollution to pressure on health services, mental health, and shifting disease burdens. As a relative outsider to public health conversations, the urgency really struck me and was driven home by the weather outside.
Public health officials are no longer preparing for a hypothetical future shock; they are managing a live, escalating, and concurrent set of risks and crises. All conversations on the day gravitated toward adaptability: how systems absorb shocks, how cities protect vulnerable residents, and how services continue to function under strain. In a global financing context where the Climate Policy Initiative estimates that 80-95% of tracked climate finance is invested in mitigation measures, public health stakeholders’ focus on adaptation and resilience stands out as a first-line defense measure against the most immediate and deadly impacts of the climate crisis.
As someone whose focus is less sector-specific and more focused on the role of digital across sectors, this has raised questions for me about whether, at a global level, policymakers have found the right balance in terms of prioritizing where and how scarce resourcing for climate change is invested. My hope is that financing and funding mechanisms are designed to ensure that they can remain adaptive in responding to immediate shocks at national and sub-national levels in particular.
Broad coalitions that center local issues are the surest route to legitimacy and impact
My second takeaway from the event was that climate services for health cannot be built by any one institution acting alone and must respond to local needs to remain legitimate and impactful. Governments provide the mandate, align climate and health priorities, and ensure that evidence informs planning, budgeting, and delivery. But, as speakers on the day noted, many of the determinants of health sit outside ministries of health, which means that policymakers working on housing, transport, labor, planning, energy, and finance all need to be part of the conversation, as their sectors are the ones that need to adapt to protect public health from climate change shocks.
The Wellcome Trust’s growing role in this space helps illustrate the point. As Alan Dangour, Wellcome’s Director of Climate and Health, noted on the day, its climate and health work has focused on strengthening research, building a transdisciplinary ecosystem, and improving the translation of evidence into action. The value-add of the Wellcome Trust’s approach, in particular, is that it can operate in the spaces that governments can’t and fill gaps by supporting the generation of scientific evidence, strengthening institutions’ ability to absorb science, and supporting coordination.
Over the course of the day, speakers highlighted the roles of other actors in the space. Medical and public health professionals are often the most trusted voices in the room, and they are well placed to translate climate risk into practical terms, whether the issue is heat stress, maternal health, respiratory illness, or mental health. Universities and research institutions have to continue producing robust evidence, but also make that evidence more legible to decision-makers. Non-governmental organizations (NGOs), civil society – and most importantly, communities themselves – play a critical role in implementation and accountability, while companies have responsibilities that range from worker protection to more resilient infrastructure and operations.
Cutting across all stakeholders’ roles is the need to depoliticize the conversation where possible. This does not mean pretending climate change is not political. It simply means speaking to people in terms they understand and care about. The examples shared by city leaders from London, Miami, and Phoenix made this clear: in one place, the immediate concern may be flooding, in another, worker safety, and in another, dirty air or overheating homes. Not every discussion needs to begin with a global framework. Often, arguments resonate more clearly and directly when they begin with a local problem and a practical response.
Data and evidence need to be integrated, locally owned, and responsive to context to add value
My third takeaway, while technical, is arguably the most important for turning ambition into action: better data flows and stronger evidence are urgently needed if climate services for health are to shape policy at scale.
Too often, relevant information sits in disconnected systems: meteorological services hold one set of data, health ministries another, statistical offices a third, researchers a fourth, and planners or finance ministries a fifth. The result is fragmentation at exactly the point where joined-up analysis is needed most. What is required is not simply more data, but better translation of data into policy action. That means improving interoperability across systems, supporting data-sharing agreements, curating climate and health evidence in usable formats, and designing digital products that respond to real policy questions rather than abstract technical ideals. It also means co-designing those tools with the people expected to use them, so that evidence arrives in forms that fit planning cycles, budget processes, and emergency response structures.
This is especially urgent in settings where climate vulnerability is high and institutional capacity is constrained. In these contexts, the gap between available evidence and practical decision-making can be especially damaging. Strengthening information availability, accessibility, and use, therefore, must be part of the core architecture, making climate-health policy more preventive, more locally relevant, and more effective.
The lesson for the future: Don’t forget these fundamentals
The overarching lesson that I take from this event is that this is a field that is moving quickly, driven by the already alarming impact that rapid climate change is having on global public health.
What I would like to see ensured as the space moves forward is that the three fundamentals highlighted in this post remain invested in: firstly, that as humanity continues to invest in climate change prevention and resilience, there is an adaptive approach to ensuring that financing is responsive as immediate priorities shift and change; secondly, that communities are engaged, and have a real stake, in local issues that affect them in ways that de-escalate and depoliticise climate change; and thirdly, that the development of integrated, sustainable and locally-relevant data systems and scientific evidence bases that are can turn policy and public concern into concrete public health policy action are invested in.