From Climate Ambition to Implementation: Positioning Health and Financing at the Center of COP31

Climate change is already harming health, yet health remains marginal in climate finance and accountability. Less than 1% of climate finance goes to projects that explicitly aim to protect health, and in 2024 developing countries that have costed their health adaptation needs received about a third of the annual amount they report. COP30 adopted eight health indicators under the Global Goal on Adaptation and called for efforts to triple adaptation finance, but the June 2026 Bonn session ended without agreement on the indicators’ technical task force or on how to reference that finance. Ahead of COP31, we argue for three shifts: treating health as a primary adaptation outcome with a tracked share of adaptation finance; providing grant‑based, directly accessible finance for ministries of health; and developing expert‑led health metrics linked to finance. We set out four concrete asks.