Recent headlines on extreme heat in Europe and flooding in India and China are a reminder that climate change is fundamentally about health and human welfare. This is reflected in the rising prominence of health within climate negotiations, from the initial consensus of the Paris Agreement to the Belém Health Action Plan at COP30 and now, the inclusion of “Dynamic and Resilient Health Systems” as a priority theme in the COP31 Action Agenda.
In South and Southeast Asia, where the health impacts of climate change are already a lived reality, climate-health governance has entered a new phase of translating international commitments into domestic policy and practice. Ministries of health and practitioners from the region had already affirmed that “health must be a central pillar of climate action, embedded within national, regional, and global frameworks,” as per the Regional Statement that we at The Asian Collective for Health Systems (TACHS) have developed in the lead-up to COP30 in November 2025.
This message was reaffirmed at the Regional Workshop on Climate-health Governance and Cooperation in South and Southeast Asia, convened this June in Kuala Lumpur. The two-day event was co-organised by the Centre for Social and Economic Progress (CSEP), United Nations University –Global Health (UNU-GH), Asia Pacific Observatory on Health Systems and Policies (APO), Sunway Centre for Planetary Health, Sunway University and the Regional Hub for Asia Climate Change and Health (REACH), Monash University Malaysia.
It saw policymakers, researchers, development partners, and civil society representatives from across Bangladesh, Cambodia, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Timor-Leste and Vietnam identify regional principles and share operational lessons on executing a just and equitable climate-health transformation.
Multiplicity of entry points for climate-health action
The countries have had different entry points for their climate-health action, rooted in their respective geographies and climate. The Philippines, for example, was driven by its extreme disaster vulnerability, whereas heatwaves, frequent outbreaks of vector-borne diseases and flooding have provided the impetus for action in India, Indonesia, Bangladesh and Thailand. Vietnam has adopted a One Health framework to design its climate response, not unlike Singapore, which continues to leverage systems that were put in place originally during the bird flu and SARS Cov2 epidemics.
The different entry points and convergence of policy mandates have served to broaden political recognition and heighten the urgency of the climate-health agenda in the region.
Towards a health systems approach to climate change
As evidence builds for the range of health impacts within each country, ministries of health are moving beyond a hazard-based or disease-specific verticalised approach towards building systemic foundations for the climate transformation. As Dr. Soumya Swaminathan, former Deputy Director of the WHO and keynote speaker at the workshop, pointed out, health system functions represent the “shared spine” between investments towards universal health coverage (UHC) and climate resilience.
Stronger institutions, integrated data, resilient service delivery, sustainable financing, a climate-competent workforce, and consistent social participation emerged as common priorities for building resilient and transformative health systems across contexts.
Synergising SDG Goals of UHC, Gender Equality, Climate Action and Sustainability
Climate-health action gains traction when it is framed not only as an environmental issue, but as an equity, development, and social protection issue. As our Cambodian participant reflected, “Lived experience gives moral weight to abstract climate targets.” Women, children, the elderly, the disabled, and other socio-economically vulnerable populations are disproportionately impacted by climate change in ways that defy simple or linear resolutions.
Bridging the climate and development agendas can create stronger political support and help bring finance ministries, planning agencies, local governments, and development partners into the conversation, while also making it more tangible for communities and frontline workers. The workshop therefore deliberately invited high-level participation from UNDP, UNFPA, UNEP, and MSF to ensure broader, more inclusive ownership of climate-health priorities in the region.
Intersectoral coordination as a central organizing principle for climate-health governance
This intersectorality is also an inevitable consideration in the design and operationalization of climate-health policy across countries. Every operational strategy described by countries — from designing nodal climate-health institutions such as in the Philippines to function as “strategic orchestrators,” to building anticipatory data intelligence systems such as in Singapore, to integrated human resource capacity-building as is beginning to be developed in India — relied on deep and ongoing coordination functions.
Sustainable institutionalization of climate-health policy and action requires explicit attention to intersectoral engagement and relationship-building through formal and informal mechanisms. Multilateral actors, including regional and global networks and forums, can help elevate the health lens, empowering ministries of health to exert agency and ensure accountability for health and welfare outcomes.
Expansive financing frameworks to respond to the urgency and the ambition
According to the WHO, only about 2% of climate adaptation finance is directed towards initiatives that protect or enhance health. Availability of resources remains the single biggest pressure point, constraining governments from effectively implementing their climate-health strategies.
While global climate-health investment has risen in theory to over US$7 billion, accessing it remains challenging due to lengthy application processes and complicated proposal requirements. The typical time taken from the initiation of a Green Climate Fund application, for example, to actually receiving the finance can extend to well over five years. This means that current climate financing for health is neither adequate to meet the scale of the challenge nor timely in facilitating progress on the ground.
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Blended financing approaches that combine domestic resources with development finance, philanthropic support, and private-sector investment are universally recommended. However, it remains unclear whether they can indeed support the institutional sustainability and long-term transformation necessary to meaningfully address the climate-health challenge. In the meantime, governments can move incrementally on setting up systems using domestic resources and building readiness to absorb external sources of finance for the implementation of climate-sensitive health programmes.
The road ahead is long and will require sustained cooperation. South and Southeast Asia are at the vanguard of both climate-health vulnerability and response. Consequently, countries across the region are experimenting with a variety of approaches towards embedding climate considerations within core health system operations, offering abundant opportunities for knowledge exchange.
Consolidating a “regional voice,” founded on practical experience and collaborative learning, can not only accelerate progress within Asia but also profoundly influence global governance of health and climate change.
Editor’s Note: The opinions expressed here by the authors are their own, not those of Impakter.com — In the Cover Photo: A masked man rides a scooter carrying a tree in Kon Tum, Vietnam, capturing the essence of local street life. Cover Photo Credit: Thái Trường Giang.
