Approach: To help tackle this funding shortage, we have developed a tool that quantifies how climate change increases healthcare demand. The tool calculates how specific challenges – such as heatwaves or floods – increase the need for healthcare services. To our knowledge, this is the first tool to directly quantify the link between climate change and healthcare. The tool will help us to prioritise climate adaptation investments in the health sector.
The tool is a proprietary Excel-based application that integrates client details, project costs and healthcare benefits during loan appraisals at the European Investment Bank (EIB). For example, it can estimate the number of additional patients who go to a hospital because of climate change. While the tool is not included in this report, we provide the framework, key methodologies and application examples.
Developing the tool involved two key steps: 1. collecting evidence on the links between climate change and healthcare needs, and 2. creating a model that quantifies these links by analysing climate risks, population vulnerabilities and types of healthcare services.
The tool focuses on Europe and uses the Copernicus dataset to make projections for climate hazards up to 2050. This dataset provides science-based information about past, current and future states of the climate in Europe. We analysed data on climate change’s effects on health by looking at hazards such as heatwaves, wildfires and flooding, as well as impacts on air quality, water quality and food safety. Geographical changes are accounted for using the NUTS25 system, which categorises European countries into three levels. NUTS refers to the “nomenclature of territorial units for statistics,” and the NUTS2 level refers to basic regional parts of countries.
Results: The tool projects that climate change will considerably increase healthcare demand by an average of 0.5%.
Our findings represent a conservative estimate of climate change’s impact on healthcare. They only consider a subset of potential effects, and assess impacts only on the average need for care, rather than on any shifts in the volatility of need. This is an initial presentation for further study. There are significant variations in different parts of Europe and in different areas of healthcare. For example, parts of Spain, Bulgaria and Romania could see a 2% to 3% rise in demand for cardiovascular and respiratory care.
The tool is in line with the multilateral development bank methodology for tracking adaptation finance around the globe. This methodology is a set of international guidelines to calculate the share of an investment in healthcare that addresses physical climate risks.
Combined with information on resilience measures, such as flood warning systems, our tool and the development banks’ methodology offer a clearer view of the adaptation Investments needed to prepare healthcare systems for climate change. These extra investments are often referred to as the “adaptation share” of financing.
Conclusions: This work will help the health sector better understand and prepare for the increasing healthcare demands caused by climate change. It also supports efforts to increase adaptation finance in the health sector. Other development banks looking to expand their activities in climate health adaptation can use our approach to develop similar tools for other regions around the world.
