This week, the 79th World Health Assembly (WHA79) is taking place in Geneva, the main forum where WHO Member States set global health priorities. The meeting comes at a time of major uncertainty for international health, marked by WHO funding cuts following the withdrawal of the United States and Argentina, and by the need to maintain the political momentum achieved last year.
In recent years, the relationship between the climate crisis and health has ceased to be viewed as a secondary issue within international negotiations. Heatwaves, air pollution, food insecurity, and the spread of infectious diseases are forcing health to be incorporated into debates that for many years were limited to emissions, energy, or climate finance. Even so, this integration remains partial and highly uneven across forums and governments.
Last year’s Assembly delivered important progress on the climate and health agenda. Countries approved the first Global Action Plan on Climate Change and Health, a roadmap for responding to the health impacts of global warming, and made climate change the first strategic objective of WHO’s General Programme of Work for 2025–2028. This was accompanied by the Belém Health Action Plan, adopted at COP30, a specific framework to help health systems adapt to climate change. These are important steps that set a clear direction, although their impact will depend on the extent to which governments translate them into concrete policies and resources.
Beyond the COP: the search for new forums
The context surrounding this year’s World Health Assembly has also been shaped by what took place a few weeks ago in Santa Marta, Colombia. More than 50 governments gathered there for the First International Conference for the Transition Beyond Fossil Fuels. The meeting demonstrated that, given the slow pace of official COP negotiations, some countries are seeking other forums in which to accelerate agreements and alliances in response to the climate crisis.
The Santa Marta meeting once again highlighted a common shortcoming in many international climate negotiations. Although the climate crisis is already having direct effects on health — from heatwaves to air pollution and the increased risk of infectious diseases — health continues to occupy a secondary place in much of the negotiations. Strengthening the connection between climate policies and public health is precisely one of the goals that organizations and experts now want to advance during the World Health Assembly and in the lead-up to COP31.
What is at stake at WHA79
This year, climate change does not appear as a standalone item on the formal agenda of the Assembly. This is not necessarily a bad sign: the frameworks have already been approved and the processes are underway, meaning that the focus of this edition is on implementation and maintaining political momentum, rather than opening new formal debates among Member States.
Even so, the week is expected to deliver substantive developments. Coinciding with WHA79, WHO has launched its Global Communication, Advocacy and Partnerships Plan for Climate Change and Health 2025–2028, aimed at strengthening the role of health within the international climate agenda. The document emphasizes stronger collaboration with other sectors, combating misinformation, and improving the resilience of health systems in the face of climate change. It also quantifies one of the main gaps in this agenda: only 0.5% of multilateral climate finance is currently allocated to projects explicitly focused on protecting human health.
In addition, a report on the commercial determinants of health is expected to be published and, according to the information available so far, it will explicitly identify fossil fuels as products harmful to health — something health organizations have been demanding for years.
Likewise, the Pan-European Commission on Climate and Health, promoted by the WHO Regional Office for Europe, has just called for climate change to be formally recognized as a public health emergency of international concern. Its recommendations also urge governments to integrate health into their national adaptation plans and climate commitments. The debate comes at a particularly worrying time. According to the Pan-European Commission on Climate and Health, air pollution linked to fossil fuels causes more than 600,000 premature deaths every year across the WHO European Region, while public subsidies to the sector reached €444 billion in 2023.
COP31 approaches and health enters the agenda
Looking beyond Geneva, COP31 — to be hosted by Türkiye and co-organized with Australia — has included health for the first time as one of the ten official priorities of the summit. Announced topics include resilient and low-carbon health systems, climate risk assessment, and early warning systems.
The challenge will be ensuring that health is not reduced to a technical issue within the negotiations. A large share of the health impacts of climate change depends on decisions made outside the health sector, in areas such as energy, transport, food systems, and international finance.
Science has long shown that climate change is already affecting health today, not only as a future threat. Heatwaves, the spread of infectious diseases, air pollution, and food insecurity are current and growing consequences. For this reason, at Salud por Derecho we call for these multilateral spaces — the WHA, the COP, and the processes surrounding them — to translate into concrete commitments: real financing for the adaptation of health systems, the phase-out of fossil fuel subsidies, and guarantees that the most vulnerable countries are not left behind either in climate action or in access to the tools they need to protect the health of their populations.
