Climate change directly threatens our health through extreme weather events, ecological damage and the spread of disease. However, a new perspective piece in The Journal of Climate Change and Health by Dan Hunt, PhD researcher, and Dr Britta Matthes, Research Associate at the University of Bath, argues that there is also a deeper, systemic concern: climate change is destabilising the political, economic, social, and technological systems necessary for effective health governance.
The governance crisis
The paper reveals that climate change forces governments to divert public sector capacity away from health policy towards emergency climate responses. This weakening of governance creates openings for corporate capture, where commercial actors can influence policy formation, implementation, and accountability mechanisms.
Mr Hunt and Dr Matthes examine how this destabilisation manifests across four interconnected systems: politics, the economy, social function, and technological advancement. They provide evidence of the widespread and unpredictable consequences for health and health equity, and how commercial actors misaligned with health exploit this destabilisation. For example, the climate impacts on gross domestic product (GDP), employment, and supply chains drive economic insecurity, and are profoundly issues of health. Some ways in which commercial actors exploit these conditions include casualised labour, or price surges for essential medicines during emergencies.
The scale of commercial influence
The evidence gathered in the paper is striking. Over 70% of major post-industrial CO₂ emissions can be traced to just 78 corporate and state producing entities, demonstrating the concentrated nature of climate-damaging activities. Meanwhile, the fossil fuel, plastics, and agrichemical industries have deployed sophisticated denial and delay strategies to obstruct decades of climate policymaking, actively undermining efforts to address the crisis.
Four key recommendations
The paper offers four recommendations for advancing intersectoral climate and health policy that addresses commercial determinants at their source, calling on governments to:
- Mainstream determinants of health approaches in intersectoral climate and health policies
- Prioritise policies that explicitly address commercial activities as determinants of both climate change and health
- Acknowledge that their past economic decisions have accelerated climate change, and to urgently re-evaluate approaches to market externalities and climate financing
- Champion the co-benefits of resilient economies, sustainable development, and human and planetary flourishing
A call for urgent action
The perspective makes clear that effective governance for health and health equity depends on stable political, environmental, social and technological systems but this stability is now at the mercy of climate change.
As the authors note: “This destabilisation is happening in fundamental, urgent and unpredictable ways, with transformative implications for societies, economies and the function of public policy. All are integral to health and health equity outcomes.
“The impacts of climate change on destabilised conditions of governance for health and health equity are also caused, worsened, and exploited by commercial actors misaligned with health, making this a key area of inquiry for commercial determinants of health policy and practice.”
Read Dan Hunt’s blog post for the University of Bath’s Institute for Policy Research: Climate change is wrecking our ability to govern for health and equity. Health-harming corporations are capitalising