Climate action must include healthcare for the most vulnerable

Disease and extreme weather compounding difficulties in delivering aid to millions.

- Christopher Lockyear

As leaders gather for the 29th climate conference (COP29) in Azerbaijan this week, they must face the reality that the climate crisis is a health crisis for millions of the most vulnerable people on our ever-warming planet—and that responding effectively means locating health at the center of discussions, policy, and funding decisions.

Recently, I joined participants at the annual Humanitarian Futures Forum hosted by Singapore's S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, which grappled with trends impacting the future of humanitarian practice. These included the climate change crisis, the erosion of norms protecting civilians and medical care in war, geopolitical re-balancing, and the impacts of technology.

My colleagues at Médecins Sans Frontières/Doctors Without Borders (MSF) work in some of the most climate-vulnerable settings in the world, among people who already lack access to basic healthcare or are deliberately excluded from healthcare. The climate crisis is hitting them the hardest. We know because we see them in our waiting rooms far more frequently. We see how failures on climate action have ripple effects on healthcare in humanitarian settings.

MSF health promotion supervisor Adamo Armando Palame in Mozambique explains it this way: "Those who wonder what climate change looks like should come to Mozambique. We are bearing the brunt of actions by the world's most polluting countries. We now have malaria all year round and we are struck by cyclone after cyclone."

Climate change exposes vulnerable people to greater risk of ill health directly—by harm from extreme weather events or from vector-borne, waterborne, and human-to-human communicable disease—or indirectly, by eroding social and economic coping mechanisms: livelihoods, healthcare systems, water, and sanitation.