This initiative acts to support countries in building their capacity to assess climate risks to health, address them through strengthening interventions, and monitor progress through indicators of climate resilience.
The problem
Climate change impacts on the health of the poorest and most vulnerable populations, and affect some of the largest disease burdens. These include malnutrition, diarrhoea, and vector-borne diseases such as malaria, which together kill over 5 million people a year. More fundamentally, ongoing climate change is undermining the environmental determinants of health; air, water, food, shelter, and protection from infectious disease. Future health hazards are projected to increase as climate change progresses. In order to protect the health of the most vulnerable populations, countries need both to strengthen their existing programmes against climate-sensitive health risks and, at the same time, assess and manage the challenges presented by a changing climate.
The most vulnerable countries are already working to address these challenges, through the health sector, and through climate change adaptation processes such as the National Adaptation Plans, supported by the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). However, international technical and financial support for adaptation remains inadequate, and health is particularly neglected: despite over 95% of Least Developed Countries identifying health as an adaptation priority, fewer than 30% have an adequate health assessment, and health projects receive less than 1% of the resources from the Least Developed Countries Fund.
The goal
The vision of the initiative is to ensure climate change, sustainable development and health, and the investments that are being made in scientific products such as the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the Global Framework on Climate Services, are translated into practical outcomes that bring measurable improvements in the lives of the most vulnerable populations. The immediate goal is to continue building climate resilience into health systems operations.
The project
The initiative acts to support countries in building their capacity to assess climate risks to health, address them through strengthening interventions, and monitor progress through indicators of climate resilience. Bilateral agreement was achieved in June 2012, and in the period 2012–2013, the initiative has received from Norway a budget of approximately $3.2 million. The initiative is supporting national programmes that are further complemented by an engagement component at the global level, promoting the integration of health, climate change and sustainable development in the key relevant development processes, including the UNFCCC and the Rio+20 process.
The project encompasses FOUR main objectives: engagement, assessment, implementation and monitoring:
- The engagement component builds on recent progress in promoting stronger, more effective, and more coherent linkages between health, climate resilience and sustainable development objectives at national and international level.
- The assessment component is defining a global framework, assembling tools to assess risk and identify effective interventions for health resilience to climate.
- The implementation component provides comprehensive programme guidance, and coordinate climate resilience plans for health in Least Developed Countries. The initiative plays a critical role in the: (i) coordination, technical support and quality control for health sections in NAPs for all LDCs; (ii) support for health managers in the technical, institutional and resource mobilization for capacity building.
- The monitoring component is defining standards, assess baselines and establish monitoring systems for progress in climate resilience, and early warning systems
The future
Since the bilateral agreement in June 2012, Norway’s political engagement and financial support has facilitated substantial progress on research and evidence, and in designing clear, objective and sustained monitoring of progress. The most important advances have been in supporting adaptation planning and piloting interventions at the national level, particularly in Africa.
It is planned that the collaboration will continue, with a focus on further consolidation of the linkages between health, climate change and sustainable development at the global strategic level, to promote the translation of evidence into operational guidance, to build capacity for countries to follow through on the implementation of their plans for climate resilience, and to ensure objective and sustained tracking of progress.
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Publication - WHO operational framework for building climate-resilient health systems