June 17, 2025
June 17, 2025
This article was originally published by the World Economic Forum
This article is part of: Centre for Health and Healthcare
As global temperatures rise and extreme weather events intensify, it’s no longer possible to separate health from climate. From vector-borne diseases in Nairobi to hospital infrastructure collapses in Chennai and flood-related care disruptions in the Philippines, the fault-lines of healthcare fragility are becoming clear. These aren’t isolated public health emergencies. They are symptoms of systems unprepared for a climate-altered world.
Health innovation today must be climate-ready – not just in the technologies it creates, but in the systems it strengthens, the partnerships it enables and the equity it delivers.
The climate crisis is a health crisis. A 2023 Lancet Countdown report concluded that over 3.3 billion people globally live in contexts highly vulnerable to climate change, with health systems on the frontlines of every heatwave, drought and storm. The World Health Organization estimates that climate change will cause approximately 250,000 additional deaths per year between 2030 and 2050 from malnutrition, malaria, diarrhoea and heat stress alone.
Beyond mortality, climate change challenges nearly every operational assumption of modern healthcare – from drug stability and cold-chain delivery, to emergency response systems and chronic disease management. These disruptions are particularly acute in low- and middle-income countries, where fragile infrastructure and limited resources leave little room for adaptive capacity.
Much of the discourse on health innovation still revolves around AI, digital therapeutics, genomics and personalized care. These are important. But unless innovation is reoriented toward systemic resilience, it risks becoming a luxury vulnerable to collapse under the pressure of climate shocks.
TheWorld Economic Forum’s 2025 white paper Healthcare in a Changing Climate reinforces the need for this shift, urging governments and private stakeholders to invest in climate-resilient infrastructure, disease surveillance and cross-sector preparedness.
A2024 Deloitte report further emphasizes that climate-resilient healthcare systems are not just a moral imperative. They are an economic one. Every $1 invested in resilience yields up to $4 in avoided health and productivity losses. Yet only 0.5% of global climate financing currently goes to health systems. This imbalance must be corrected, and fast, if health systems are to endure in a warming world.
Climate-resilient healthcare isn’t a vague ideal. It is a design principle, and it’s already being operationalized.
In Bangladesh, for example, a network of flood-resilient community clinics has been built on raised platforms, with solar-powered refrigeration and modular treatment units. These have helped maintain maternal and childcare services even during monsoon-induced displacements.
In Colombia, the Ministry of Health has partnered with local weather services to deploy climate-informed disease prediction models, helping rural communities pre-empt dengue outbreaks. And in Kenya, organizations likeShining Hope for Communities (SHOFCO) are blending digital tools with water security, sanitation and mobile health, enabling resilience against both epidemics and environmental shocks in informal housing.
These are not just pilot projects. They are blueprints for building climate-resilient health systems globally.
It’s tempting for wealthier countries to assume they lead innovation. But many climate-health solutions are emerging from regions with the fewest resources, precisely because necessity drives frugal, systems-level thinking.
Low-tech interventions like telemedicine on solar-powered tablets, mobile vaccine clinics with evaporative coolers or community-run early warning systems show that innovation doesn’t always mean high-tech. It means employing the right tech for the right challenge, in the right context.
Global health partnerships must evolve from aid to co-creation. Climate adaptation must be locally led, culturally relevant and embedded in national health plans, not grafted on through short-term pilots.
Global health funding mechanisms must better integrate climate resilience into health financing. Only0.3% of total multilateral climate finance currently supports health-related adaptation, and much of that goes to infrastructure retrofits rather than systemic resilience.
Multilateral development banks, global health organizations and national ministries must embed climate metrics and risk modelling into all health innovation and procurement frameworks.
Highlighted in the 2025 World Health Assembly and looking ahead to COP30, resilience must move to the centre of the global health agenda, not just as a climate issue, but as a core principle of sustainable health system design.
Climate-resilient health systems won’t emerge from isolated interventions. They require structural shifts: cross-sector collaboration, blended finance, inclusive technology and decentralized infrastructure. Innovation must be judged not just by efficacy in labs, but by durability in the face of floods, heatwaves and displacement.
This is the next frontier of health innovation. It begins by acknowledging a truth that communities in Bangladesh, Nairobi and Bogotá have long known: health and climate are inseparable, and resilience is the bridge between them.
