For the better part of a decade, researchers working at the intersection of climate change and human health have been desperately sounding alarm bells about the significant public health threats lurking in every tenth of a degree of planetary warming. Billions of people are at risk from illnesses linked to extreme heat; malnutrition following crop failure; bacteria and viruses that lurk in mosquitoes, ticks, and water; and other climate-driven threats. 

Yet health has never been on the official agenda at the annual United Nations climate change conference, where leaders representing countries around the globe gather to negotiate climate policy. That changed at this year’s Conference of the Parties, or COP28, which is currently taking place in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Sunday was the first ever COP “Health Day,” designed to bring together health and environment ministers from dozens of countries to discuss the health effects of climate change and brainstorm potential solutions.

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“For too long, health has been a footnote in climate discussions,” Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of the World Health Organization, said on Sunday. “No more.” 

Health researchers and advocates celebrated the milestone, but when Health Day was over and the resulting commitments were tallied, most emphasized that more needs to be done to protect communities from the health impacts of the climate crisis. “We must not lose sight of the actual negotiations happening behind closed doors, especially on the fossil fuel phaseout, which is what will truly slow and stop climate change from worsening,” said Ramon Lorenzo Luis Guinto, director of the planetary and global health program at St. Luke’s Medical Center College of Medicine in the Philippines and a COP28 attendee. 

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Even before Health Day began, delegates from 123 countries had already signed the COP28 UAE Declaration on Climate and Health, a nonbinding commitment to protect communities by investing in climate adaptation measures and making health systems more resilient to climate impacts.

A pink mosquito net is stretched around figures lying on a platform on the back of a bicycle, in front of a thicket of plants
People use a mosquito net to protect themselves from dengue in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Syed Mahamudur Rahman / NurPhoto via Getty Images

The declaration has some significant funding behind it: A coalition of philanthropies and aid organizations, such as the Rockefeller Foundation and the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria, collectively pledged $1 billion in new funding to address the climate health crisis. A COP28 spokesperson told Grist that the funding had all been pledged recently — either in the lead-up to the conference or during the event. For instance, the $100 million contributed by the Rockefeller Foundation was announced in September as part of the philanthropy’s five-year “climate strategy,” a Rockefeller spokesperson said.

“Climate change is increasingly impacting the health and well-being of our communities,” said President Lazarus Chakwera of Malawi, one of the initial backers of the declaration. “Extreme weather events have displaced tens of thousands of our citizens and sparked infectious disease outbreaks that have killed thousands more.” 

More than 40 banks, governments, and other organizations also signed on to a set of 10 broad principles aimed at guiding international financing for climate and health infrastructure, local projects, and solutions. The principles include supporting the climate and health priorities of countries most affected by climate change and simplifying the processes for accessing available climate and health funds. 

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On Health Day, global donors including UAE President Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation pledged nearly $800 million to eradicate neglected tropical diseases — a group of 20 climate-sensitive illnesses that affect 1.6 billion of the world’s poorest people, the majority of whom are already extremely vulnerable to the effects of climate change.  

Get caught up on COP28

What is COP28? Every year, climate negotiators from around the world gather under the auspices of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change to assess countries’ progress toward reducing carbon emissions and limiting global temperature rise. 

The 28th Conference of the Parties, or COP28, is taking place in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, between November 30 and December 12 this year.

Read more: The questions and controversies driving this year’s conference

What happens at COP? Part trade show, part high-stakes negotiations, COPs are annual convenings where world leaders attempt to move the needle on climate change.

While activists up the ante with disruptive protests and industry leaders hash out deals on the sidelines, the most consequential outcomes of the conference will largely be negotiated behind closed doors. Over two weeks, delegates will pore over language describing countries’ commitments to reduce carbon emissions, jostling over the precise wording that all 194 countries can agree to.

What are the key issues at COP28 this year?

Global stocktake: The 2016 landmark Paris Agreement marked the first time countries united behind a goal to limit global temperature increase. The international treaty consists of 29 articles with numerous targets, including reducing greenhouse gas emissions, increasing financial flows to developing countries, and setting up a carbon market. For the first time since then, countries will conduct a “global stocktake” to measure how much progress they’ve made toward those goals at COP28 and where they’re lagging.

Fossil fuel phaseout or phasedown: Countries have agreed to reduce carbon emissions at previous COPs, but have not explicitly acknowledged the role of fossil fuels in causing the climate crisis until recently. This year, negotiators will be haggling over the exact phrasing that signals that the world needs to transition away from fossil fuels. They may decide that countries need to phase down or phase out fossil fuels or come up with entirely new wording that conveys the need to ramp down fossil fuel use. 

Read more: ‘Phaseout’ or ‘phasedown’? Why UN climate negotiators obsess over language

Loss and damage: Last year, countries agreed to set up a historic fund to help developing nations deal with the so-called loss and damage that they are currently facing as a result of climate change. At COP28, countries will agree on a number of nitty-gritty details about the fund’s operations, including which country will host the fund, who will pay into it and withdraw from it, as well as the makeup of the fund’s board. 

Read more: The difficult negotiations over a loss and damage fund

In addition to these landmark pledges, Health Day at COP28 included dozens of health-focused events that took place in an official health pavilion, as well as in other pavilions and tents across the conference. Kristie L. Ebi, a climate and health researcher at the University of Washington who has attended every COP since 1997, called the day a “watershed moment” for her field. “Most of us spent our day going from one pavilion to another to talk about climate change and health,” she said. “The visibility overall of climate change and health dramatically shifted with this COP.”

As prior COPs have shown, making climate commitments is often the easy part — actually seeing them through is much harder. Jeni Miller, executive director of the Global Climate and Health Alliance, said the Declaration on Climate and Health was welcome but cautioned against assuming that the declaration will lead to material benefits for affected populations. “It contains no plans for action right now, and does not have clear goals or targets,” she said. “Nor does it mention the extraction and burning of fossil fuels as the leading cause of climate change and climate-related health threats.” The $1 billion pledge, she added, also does not contain language that describes how developing countries can secure funds for local climate and health projects. How that money will be distributed or used remains to be seen. 

Speaking at an event on Health Day, Maria Neira, director of the Public Health, Environment and Social Determinants of Health Department of the World Health Organization, put it succinctly: “This is quite historic,” she said, “but it is just the first day of history.” 

Two men are seated at a panel in front of a green background that says COP28UAE
Sultan Al-Jaber, the president of COP28, and Jim Skea, the chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, at COP28 in Dubai. Nuran Erkul Kaya / Anadolu via Getty Images

More history could be made at COP28. Negotiators are currently debating “an orderly and just phaseout of fossil fuels,” which, if it is adopted, would be the first international deal on the books to call for an end to fossil fuel use. But progress is extremely tenuous — striking a deal on any climate proposal requires unanimous consent from all participating countries. It takes just one dissenting nation to scramble a negotiation, and Saudi Arabia’s energy minister said on Monday that he will not agree to “phaseout” or “phasedown” fossil fuels. Saudi Arabia’s commitment to fossil fuels does not make it an outlier at the conference. Recent reporting revealed the president of COP28, Sultan Al-Jaber, has falsely claimed there is “no science” backing up the idea that eliminating fossil fuels is key to keeping global warming in check. 

Still, mitigating climate change is just one part of the challenge the world faces. For the world’s developing countries, which contribute a very small amount to the world’s carbon budget, adapting to the consequences of rising temperatures is now more important than mitigating its effects. That’s why the pledges made at Health Day are significant, Ebi said. Preparing these countries for the health-related climate impacts to come is “fundamental to their national development,” she said. At COP28, the preparations finally got underway.