Healthcare in a Changing Climate 2025

Next, a review of the currently available treatments was conducted, focusing on prevention protocols, diagnostics, treatments, public health services such as early warning systems, and testing and ongoing research across pharmaceutical companies. This analysis revealed gaps in the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of high-burden diseases, highlighting areas where effective solutions are either lacking or underdeveloped. As a result, 99 unmet needs were identified across eight priority diseases. Finally, these 99 unmet medical needs were prioritized based on their potential to significantly reduce negative disease outcomes and improve quality of life, while reducing the overall economic impact and providing sufficient incentives to foster investment and innovation. To ensure alignment with real-world challenges, input was sought from academic experts, researchers and clinicians. Given the complexity and variations in the scientific and medical literature, these consultations were crucial in validating the findings and ensuring that both the prioritization of unmet medical needs and assumptions for investment case development were accurate and actionable. From the prioritized list of unmet needs, 36 were identified as high- and medium-high impact and selected for investment case assessment. The investment case was broken down into its components, namely preventable impact and the required investments. This supported the assessment of financial and ethical returns on investments in climate and health.3.1 Estimating the potential to reduce the impact of climate change on health To calculate the preventable health impacts, productivity loss and additional deaths, three parameters (B-D) were considered. To calculate the preventable healthcare costs, an additional parameter (E) was included to capture healthcare costs associated with the delivery of innovative medical interventions. This approach was replicated for each of the 36 high-priority unmet needs. Overall, preventable impact quantification relied on the parameters detailed below (see Figure A3). Building investment cases for how to address unmet medical needs and produce step-change impact reductions3 Approach for quantifying preventable impacts for an unmet need FIGURE A3 Preventable health impact, productivity loss, additional deaths, cumulative by 2050 Preventable healthcare costs, cumulative by 2050 A Impact trigger ed by climate changeShar e of health and economic impacts that specific unmet need could r educeB xShar e of health and economic impacts addr essable by life sciences sectorC xEffectiveness of new solutionD x =Preventable impactF A Impact trigger ed by climate changeShar e of health and economic impacts that specific unmet need could r educeB xShar e of health and economic impacts addr essable by life sciences sectorC xEffectiveness of new solutionD x xHealthcar e savings ratio to prevented health impactsE Preventable healthcare costsF = Source: World Economic Forum and Oliver Wyman analysis. Healthcare in a Changing Climate: Investing in Resilient Solutions 35