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

Authors: Neil Jennings and Caterina Brandmayr

This briefing paper outlines the opportunities to deliver climate and health benefits across key sectors and highlights relevant transport, housing, diet and green space-related recommendations from the Climate Change Committee’s (CCC) 2023 and 2024 Progress Reports on mitigation and adaptation and the National Infrastructure Commission’s (NIC) Second National Infrastructure Assessment (2023).

Headlines

• To achieve Net Zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 and contribute to global efforts to avoid the worst consequences of climate change, policies are required 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.
• Climate action could play an important role in helping to reduce existing health inequalities, for example, by improving the insulation of UK housing so those on lower incomes can afford to heat their homes and are 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 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 and challenging economic outlook for the country that both point towards the need to make existing budgets go further and to identify preventative health interventions that help to reduce the strain on the NHS.