Deadly Global Heat Spurs $300 Million Climate-Health Push at COP30

With more than half a million people worldwide dying each year from heat-related causes, a coalition of major philanthropies is committing $300 million to develop life-saving solutions as global temperatures continue to rise.

The funding, announced this week at the COP30 climate negotiations in Brazil, will support efforts to gather data and identify the most effective investments for reducing mounting risks from extreme heat, air pollution, and infectious diseases.

“We are a philanthropy. We can’t just keep plugging holes and resuscitating a dying model of development,” said Estelle Willie, director of health policy and communications at The Rockefeller Foundation, one of the funders. “So what we are trying to do is use our philanthropic capital to start testing and validating new solutions, and to do so collaboratively.”

Separately, COP30 host Brazil launched the Belem Health Action Plan, an initiative encouraging governments to monitor and coordinate climate-related health policy across ministries and agencies. The effort is part of Brazil’s broader push at the UN climate talks to strengthen countries’ ability to prepare for—and adapt to—worsening climate impacts including floods, fires, droughts, storms, and hurricanes.

The new $300 million pledge adds to the estimated $1 billion to $2 billion in public funding currently directed toward researching climate-related health impacts, according to a 2023 study in the journal PLOS. But experts say far more investment is needed.

“Progress on health is declining,” Willie told Reuters. “We’ve had hard-fought wins through technology and global health systems, but climate change is now making every single health problem worse.”

A report released in October by The Lancet estimates that nearly 550,000 deaths each year are caused by heat made more severe by climate change. Another 150,000 annual deaths are linked to air pollution—often from fossil fuel burning and increasingly from wildfires—while cases of some infectious diseases continue to rise. Dengue fever, for example, has increased by 49 percent since the 1950s.

UN agencies estimated in August that more than 3.3 billion people—roughly half the world’s population—are already struggling with intensifying heat.

“The warnings from scientists on climate change have become reality. And it is clear that not all people are affected equally,” said John-Arne Røttingen, chief executive of the Wellcome Trust, another funder. The most vulnerable include children, pregnant women, older adults, outdoor workers, and communities with the fewest resources to respond, he added.

Other funders participating in the newly announced Climate and Health Funders Coalition include the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Bloomberg Philanthropies, and the IKEA Foundation. Twenty-seven additional philanthropies have joined the coalition but have not yet committed financial support.