How can action to tackle climate change improve people’s health and save the NHS money?

Achieving Net Zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 and contributing to global efforts to avoid the worst consequences of climate change requires policies that reduce emissions across the whole of UK society including the transport, housing and agriculture sectors.

As well as helping to tackle climate change, many of these policies bring considerable short-term benefits to other aspects of society, particularly to improving public health and reducing NHS expenditure and health inequalities. Disadvantaged and vulnerable populations are not only already more likely to suffer from ill health (Institute of Health Equity, 2020), but they are also expected to be most impacted by climate change, for example, through higher exposure to extreme heat. Failing to effectively tackle climate change could therefore further increase health inequalities (UK Health Security Agency, 2023). On the contrary, if directed appropriately, climate action could not only avoid negative impacts from a warming climate, but also play an important role in helping to reduce existing health inequalities. For example, by improving the insulation of UK housing, those on lower incomes could benefit from lower bills to heat their homes and would be less likely to get ill from living in a cold or damp property or suffer physical and mental health consequences from having to choose whether to ‘heat or eat’.

The synergies between health and climate action were strongly emphasised at the COP28 Climate Summit in December 2023. The opportunity to address multiple challenges in a joined-up manner is particularly relevant to the UK, given the high level of pressure on NHS services (NHS England, March 2024) and challenging economic outlook for the country (Office for Budget Responsibility, March 2024) – both of which point to the need to make existing budgets go further and to identify preventative health interventions that help to reduce the strain on the NHS.

Below we outline opportunities to deliver climate and health benefits across key sectors and highlight relevant transport, housing, diet and green space-related recommendations from the recent Climate Change Committee’s 2023 and 2024 Progress Reports on mitigation and adaptationi and the National Infrastructure Commission’s (NIC) Second National Infrastructure Assessment (2023). These represent areas where insufficient action has been taken so far but where appropriate interventions could deliver multiple benefits for climate change, public health and reducing NHS costs going forward.