Delivering for climate and health: insights from UK decision-makers

Authors: Dr Neil Jennings, Edward Sudall, Dr Caterina Brandmayr, Dr Nicole Cowell and Dr Audrey de Nazelle

Media enquiries: grantham.media@imperial.ac.uk
Policy enquiries: neil.jennings@imperial.ac.uk

Action to tackle climate change can provide a range of benefits to public health including through reducing exposure to air pollution, improving the quality of homes and promoting physical activity.

These co-benefits are not only popular with the public, but ensuring climate action delivers for public health would also help reduce costs to the NHS and the UK economy, and help government funding go further by multi-problem solving.

Through interviews with UK decision-makers from local to national government, this report investigates how the health benefits of climate action are currently considered in the decision-making process to highlight examples of good practice and areas for improvement. Insights from interviewees point to three key areas that need strengthening, if the UK is to effectively consider and realise these health co-benefits:

1. Improve the monitoring and evaluation of existing and future policies to better capture health-related outcomes;
2. Implement policy frameworks that integrate health in climate-related decision-making and support collaboration and coordination between departments;
3. Build awareness and raise the salience of the health benefits of climate action amongst political leaders.

Crucially, there are already a number of examples of good practice across the UK. These can provide a useful starting point for different levels of government to scale up their ambition in realising the health co-benefits of climate action.

In October 2025, the Grantham Institute and Centre for Environmental Policy hosted a webinar to discusses the report and its findings. Watch in full here.

You can download the slides from the webinar here: Delivering for climate and health - insights from UK decision makers - slides