How life sciences innovation and collaboration could halve climate change’s adverse health effects

Over the next 25 years, there will be an additional 14.5 million deaths and significantly decreased quality of life as a result of climate-related events like droughts, flooding and rising sea levels, as well as spikes in diseases aggravated by global warming. Alongside $12.5 trillion in economic losses, healthcare costs would rise by $1.1 trillion.

By 2050, there could be as many as 1.2 billion climate refugees and an additional 500 million people exposed to malaria and dengue fever as rising temperatures expand the geographic range of disease-carrying mosquitos into Europe and North America. Between now and 2050, food and water scarcity will also be major health challenges for billions of people.

The picture is bleak, but there is potential to avoid the worst of these impacts by acting now. A series of rapid, focused investments in research and development (R&D) into new new vaccines and other prevention measures, treatments and technologies could cut as much as half of climate change’s negative health outcomes.

For this to happen, a new report from the World Economic Forum and Oliver Wyman, which will be published on 17 January 2025, estimates investment in climate-related life sciences innovation must reach $65 billion over the next five to eight years. While that sounds substantial, it amounts to less than 5% of annual R&D spending today by the global pharmaceutical industry.

This level of investment could save 6.5 million lives and avoid $5.8 trillion in global economic losses, as well as one billion disability-adjusted life years (DALYs) due to disabilities or chronic illness connected to climate.

To get ahead of the health crisis, policy-makers should consider mechanisms to facilitate financing R&D and bolster the world’s health systems and supply chains. The key to addressing climate change’s health effects will be working with the same urgency and cooperation between government and industry that allowed life sciences companies to produce COVID-19 vaccines in less than a year.

While sufficient investment is a critical element, mitigation will also require a proliferation of public-private partnerships and innovative funding mechanisms. But there are roadblocks to these climate-driven health solutions.

A significant obstacle to adequate investment is the uncertainty about the time it will take to develop and approve new climate-driven health solutions, and the level of their eventual uptake. The ambiguity surrounding the timetable for return on investment discourages private investors and pharma companies from committing sufficient resources. Public health is already seeing this stagnation in the introduction of new antibiotics, a category in which only 12 drugs have been developed since 2017.

One of the most important steps governments took during the COVID-19 pandemic was to guarantee pharmaceutical companies an adequate incentive by pre-purchasing millions of doses of the vaccines while they were still under development. For climate-related health therapies, the industry and potential investors would benefit from similar assurances that new treatments can reach commercial scalability and provide a reasonable return on investment, as COVID-19 treatments did. Working together in public-private partnerships to understand and overcome these kinds of barriers and build incentives in this manner will be pivotal to success.

Most of the early impacts of climate change on health will be concentrated in less-developed economies. These regions are unable to finance the necessary public health remedies, so funding efforts must be global and attract broad support from more economically developed nations.

But while climate-aggravated diseases will be concentrated among more vulnerable populations, many are expected to rapidly spread. Take mosquito-borne diseases like malaria and dengue, which primarily affect people in Africa and Asia today. Global warming is already pushing disease-carrying mosquito populations into North America and Europe. By the end of the century, as many as 8.4 billion people will be exposed to malaria and dengue annually.

Another complication for life sciences innovation is the myriad of disjointed regulatory, financial and tax incentives between countries, which make it difficult for companies to develop cohesive strategies across multiple regions. This could limit the reach of innovative climate-driven health solutions and infringe on the incentive to develop new products. Unclear or unpredictable regulatory pathways and a lack of technical and regulatory capacity in low- and middle-income countries can hinder investment and prevent widespread production of higher quality products at reduced costs.

The US Food and Drug Administration’s accelerated approval of COVID-19 vaccines in 2020 demonstrates how flexible regulatory frameworks can expedite critical healthcare solutions. Regulatory accommodations for COVID-19 therapies were a key factor in enabling rapid patient access to vaccines and limiting the virus’ most negative impacts to less than two years. Another example of the need for more flexible and supportive regulation would be passage of the US Orphan Drug Act of 1983, which aimed to make it financially viable for drug makers to develop therapies for rare diseases.

Integrating climate information into routine decision-making in the health sector also poses challenges for the industry because climate and health experts don’t routinely share data or have places where the two can combine insights.

Building advanced climate-health data platforms with artificial intelligence that integrate diverse data sets would enable better forecasting of climate-driven diseases. This could improve response times and lead to more targeted interventions. Investment in these platforms would help identify disease patterns influenced by climate change, enabling pharmaceutical companies to proactively develop solutions.

In 2023, private and public sector thought leaders, including the World Health Organization, the World Meteorological Organization, the Wellcome Trust and the Rockefeller Foundation, agreed on a three-year action agenda for integrating climate and health data and surveillance systems. This includes identifying prioritized gaps and initial requirements for integrating climate and weather information into health information systems.

None of this can happen without policy-makers, industry leaders and the public recognizing the threat of global warming and the need for climate-driven health solutions. But climate change’s deceptive lack of immediacy has always been a major hurdle to garnering a sufficient sense of urgency and a proportionally adequate response.

Scientists now contend the window for climate action is shrinking: The Earth’s temperature rise is now expected to exceed 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels by 2030 – a critical tipping point for climate risk. This leaves less than five years to develop new therapies, reinforce the global health system and establish the kind of public-private collaboration needed to scale the rollout of such solutions and services.