WHO Climate change and health team is focusing on the following areas of work:

  • Advocacy and partnerships: coordinating with partner agencies within the UN system, and ensuring that health is properly represented in the climate change agenda, as well as providing and disseminating information on the threats that climate change presents to human health, and opportunities to promote health while cutting carbon emissions;
  • Monitoring and evidence: coordinating reviews of the scientific evidence on the links between climate change and health; assessing country's preparedness and needs when facing climate change; and developing a global research agenda;
  • Supporting countries to protect human health from climate change: strengthening national capacities and improving the resilience and adaptive capacity of health systems to deal with the adverse health effects of climate change;
  • Building capacity on climate change and human health: assisting countries to build capacity to reduce health vulnerability to climate change, and promote health while reducing carbon emissions.

WHO is taking concrete steps to improve its environmental sustainability and reduce its carbon footprint. Learn more about Sustainability practices at WHO.

 

Contact

Unit Head

Dr Diarmid Campbell-Lendrum

Head of Climate Change, Energy, and Air Quality Unit at WHO Headquaters

Dr. Diarmid CAMPBELL-LENDRUM is the Head of Climate Change, Energy, and Air Quality Unit at WHO Headquarters. He has worked on the issue for over 20 years, playing key roles in the first quantitative estimates of global health impacts of climate change, resolutions of the World Health Assembly, WHO global conferences, and the expansion of WHO’s climate change and health support to over 30 low and middle income countries. A keen cyclist, he rode from Geneva to Paris for WHO’s 2nd Global Conference on Health and Climate Change and from Geneva to London the deliver the “Health Argument for Climate Action” WHO report and the "Healthy Climate Prescription" letter ahead of COP26.

Learn more