Building Economic Resilience to the Health Impacts of Climate Change 2025

2 Improve climate resilience of existing medical products Reformulating drugs for heat stability and improving packaging can reduce cold-chain dependency, decrease spoilage and extend shelf life. Medical devices can be redesigned for reliability in low-resource or emergency settings with features like battery backups or solar charging. These adaptations would cut waste and costs, and serve as a competitive advantage.Regulators can support climate resilience by updating stability guidelines to reflect future environmental conditions, ensuring medicines remain safe and effective under climate stress. It is important, however, to balance regulation increases with medicine availability, as increased regulation can have a significant impact on low-margin goods, including generics. Ferring Pharmaceuticals has developed a heat- stable version of carbetocin that can help prevent dangerous bleeding after childbirth – a leading cause of death for mothers worldwide. In the largest study of its kind, involving nearly 30,000 women across ten countries, the medicine was shown to work just as well as the current standard treatment, oxytocin. Unlike oxytocin, which must be kept cold, carbetocin stays effective even in hot climates, making it ideal for use in low-income countries where refrigeration is hard to maintain. As climate change increases temperatures and disrupts cold supply chains, developing essential medicines that remain stable without refrigeration is becoming increasingly important for global health. Building resilience with heat-stable pharmaceuticals BOX 9 3 Establish care centres in climate- vulnerable regions Healthcare must be tailored to local climate-health risks, requiring a shift in care facility locations. These sites should provide healthcare access for underserved populations, deliver preventive care and support better health outcomes with leaner, more cost-effective set-ups. Providers can also harness innovative care delivery models, including telehealth and mobile care units, to ensure flexible and continuous care during climate disruptions. The Burjeel Holdings Center for Climate and Health integrates climate resilience into clinical care for the United Arab Emirates’ diverse and vulnerable populations. Serving construction workers, elderly adults, children, patients with chronic conditions and socially vulnerable groups, the centre addresses heat-related illnesses and climate-health impacts through preventative care protocols. Harnessing a cutting-edge generative AI platform, the centre will conduct proactive multilingual patient outreach via telephone, providing 24/7 climate risk alerts, hydration guidance and emergency preparedness instructions. This innovative approach will combine advanced AI healthcare technology with personalized medicine to tackle emerging climate- related health challenges.Integrating climate resilience into healthcare BOX 10 Building Economic Resilience to the Health Impacts of Climate Change 32