UAE announces $1 bln finance for climate and health, 123 nations agree to declaration

Over 123 countries committed to signing the UAE’s health declaration, COP28 President Sultan al-Jaber said on Saturday ahead of the first-ever health day at the UN climate conference.

The declaration on climate and health is a commitment to meet and collaborate on policies, health systems, response to the impact of climate, reducing waste, curbing emissions, sharing best practices, and more.

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Al-Jaber said climate change is “increasingly becoming a health challenge” and that the two are “very much interconnected” during a keynote at a session titled ‘Putting health at the center of the climate agenda.’

Adverse climate is impacting food and water security and the availability of clean air, the COP28 president said. The WHO estimates attribute seven million deaths to air pollution annually.

“The declaration seeks to increase cross-sector collaboration, reduce emissions in the health sector, and increase climate financing,” al-Jaber said, reiterating that the private sector “must find their way to finance climate health interventions.”

Apart from the countries who have already committed to the declaration, al-Jaber said he continues asking others to sign up.

“Those who have not signed up already have given me the right signals and positive responses that they will be signing up soon.”

‘…act of self-sabotage’

In the following keynote, WHO Director-General Tedros Ghebreyesus said that good health is difficult to maintain “in a world full of more frequent and severe heatwaves, wildfires, floods and droughts; with increasing temperatures fueling the spread of infectious diseases, destroying harvests and increasing water scarcity.”

“Our addiction to oil, gas and coal is not just an act of environmental vandalism. From the health perspective, it’s an act of self-sabotage,” Ghebreyesus said.

Thanking the UAE for “putting health front and center,” Ghebreyesus said the latest declaration builds on the momentum of previous summits and serves as a call to action and political commitment to climate and health.

“This is critical for low income countries,” he added.

‘Health, a human face of climate change’

The UAE Minister of State for International Cooperation Reem al-Hashimy urged “not to view investment in the health climate nexus as a cost, but instead an exception and a lever for our societies and for overall economic productivity.”

The minister said the declaration “captures both the threats and the opportunities that set out a transformational agenda and shared priorities for countries to act.”

At the event, al-Hashimy announced an aggregate $1 billion tranche of finance enabled by a series of commitments by the Green Climate Fund, the Asian Development Bank, Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, and the Rockefeller Foundation.

The investments will go toward public health measures, building sustainable health systems, and solutions across sectors that simultaneously reduce carbon emissions and air pollution.

“We must reframe and relook at our entire architecture as we address this new alarming nexus. These principles have now been endorsed by more than 40 partners, including climate financiers and global health financiers, as well as development banks, countries, philanthropies and the private sector,” al-Hashimy said.

On Sunday, COP28 will become the first UNFCCC climate conference to host a health day.

A high-level ministerial meeting will discuss the impact of climate change on health, with a key focus on heat waves as the world treads toward marking 2023 as the hottest year on record.

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