FST JOURNAL
Health and Climate Change
DOI: https://www.doi.org/10.53289/XFPJ6000
Putting health into the search for climate solutions
Modi Mwatsama
Dr Modi Mwatsama was Head of Interventions for Climate & Health at the Wellcome Trust where she led the Trust’s programme of research to support science-based solutions for climate change and health. She is now Head of Capacity and Field Development at the Trust. She joined the Trust in 2018 as Senior Science Lead for Food Systems in the Our Planet, Our Health programme. Prior to Wellcome, Modi was the Director of Policy and Global Health at the UK Health Forum. She is a Registered Nutritionist.
In 2021 September, the Wellcome Trust embarked on a new approach to investing in science in order to solve the world's health challenges. It continues to fund discovery research. The new strategy, meanwhile, is focussing on three of the world's global challenges: infectious diseases, climate and health; and mental health.
The discovery and challenge programmes are underpinned by a major focus on diversity and inclusion, as well as the promotion of positive research cultures in the research that we fund. Over the next 10 years, the Trust is committed to spend £16 billion on this strategy globally.
The world is currently on a trajectory of increasing climate change. Wellcome’s mission is to accelerate action and progress towards mitigating climate change by putting health at the heart of climate action and investing in solutions which help protect people from the change that is already baked into the system.
Even if we were to meet the Paris goals, the world will be at least 1.5˚C warmer. So, the Trust will generate evidence to spur action, inform actions to mitigate and adapt, while advocating for coordination and cooperation in order to build a healthy and sustainable future.
Four goals
The strategy has four goals all of them focussed on transformation. The first is a transformational advance in the availability, access and use of evidence on the direct and indirect effects that climate
change will have on people's health in different regions of the world. The Trust will fund research to better understand the mechanisms by which events like increasing floods, fires and droughts will adversely affect people's health. There is a need to quantify those impacts in terms of both health and economic costs.
The second goal is to support a transformational advance in the generation and use of evidence that can identify the effective mitigation actions needed to help meet – or even exceed – the Paris goals, while at the same time promoting health co-benefits.
The third goal is a transformational advance again, this time in the generation and use of evidence to identify effective adaptation solutions to help protect people, vulnerable groups and communities from the adverse effects of health.
The fourth goal is concerned with catalysing a global community of policymakers, the public and communities who are able to understand and use the evidence generated in order to promote health. It will equip researchers from different disciplines to collaborate through activities such as training and fellowships as well as through improved methods and data platforms.
Heat-related issues
We launched a call to evaluate interventions which help protect people from the excess heat exposure in low- and-middle income countries, particularly in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Because it was focussed on communities who were most at risk and affected by climate change, we required the principal investigators to be based in the countries where the research was taking place. They also had to be nationals of those countries and collaborate with local policymakers in the study in order to be better placed to influence those policymakers. We know that policymakers are more inclined to listen to the evidence when it is coming from their own experts and they are engaged in shaping the research priorities. That is a model we are planning to invest in more in future.
This particular call recognises that the capacity to undertake this sort of research is less established in developing countries. We are therefore encouraging proposals to have a strong focus on capacity strengthening, to ensure that our investments enable stakeholders in countries where the research is taking place to be better equipped to undertake and use this type of research in the future.
We also launched a call on biological vulnerability to extreme heat in mothers and children, which we developed with colleagues at the Physiological Society. This aims to understand the mechanisms by which chronic exposure to excessive heat in mothers and children impacts their biology. The research teams can be based anywhere in the world.
A third call is focused on G7 countries. It is aimed at transdisciplinary research to advance the adoption or implementation of climate mitigation policies – to reduce emissions-related global warming and improve health. The policies we are interested in focus on food systems, energy, transport and housing. Applications need to demonstrate that there is a particular policy opportunity, that the research project can directly feed into the adoption of the new policy, or that it can help to improve the implementation of a particular policy. The G7 countries have been chosen
because of their high levels of historic emissions, their influence on the global stage, and their moral responsibility to lead the way.
Global in scope
So the strategy is global in scope and focussed on mitigation, placing responsibility on those with historic responsibilities to lead the way. However, it also looks at opportunities for adaptation, focussing on the countries which are going to be most affected by climate change in order to help them develop solutions that can protect their health.
We want to support emerging and developing countries to develop more sustainably. So we will be investing in sustainable development pathways and ways of growing economies which avoid locking in high levels of carbon. We are also investing in foundational data capabilities: for example, the Trust has invested in a group which will improve the ability to track health impacts of climate change through developing the capability of national statistics agencies. We will also help to convene the international community around reporting methods and standards. This work is being led by the UK ONS in partnership with the Cochrane Climate-Health Working Group and other partners and will result in ways to facilitate international comparisons.
We have funded the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD) to review the opportunities to integrate health into the global environment agenda. The result is a toolkit to enable those environmental sectors whose policies have an impact on health to integrate health into their priorities.
A further area of engagement was with the Lancet Countdown, which is a global project that tracks progress towards the Paris goals across 44 global indicators. Through it we have been supporting efforts to track progress, specifically in health impacts.
Finally, we are exploring how we might develop fellowships, both for policymakers and researchers. These will then be able to undertake the sort of research and action that will help us all meet our objectives to put health at the heart of climate action.