Climate change: a VaccinesWork guide
This week VaccinesWork is spotlighting climate change, a health threat of planetary proportions. Stick with us to learn the part vaccines can play as humanity struggles to adapt.
- 18 November 2024
- 3 min read
- by Maya Prabhu , James Fulker
As UN chief António Guterres sounds the alarm on “stalled” talks at COP29, and evidence mounts that human-made climate change is precipitating “impossible” and deadly weather events of all sorts around the world, it’s safe to say the house is on fire.
Vaccines aren’t going to rescue our burning planet. But they have the power to save a lot of vulnerable people from the diseases already surging in response to climate change, and that, arguably, amounts to buying time.
We’ve seen what that looks like at the micro scale. When much of Pakistan was deluged in 2022, for instance, vaccines rolled out to hold back the wave of disease that was bound to crash over the millions of displaced people, now crowded together on higher ground, surrounded by unsanitary and insect-thick floodwaters. Cholera, meantime, is resurging around the world amid a spate of weather events that have, in many cases, left sanitation infrastructure in ruins – but in 2023, a record 35 million doses of oral cholera vaccine were shipped out from the global stockpile to parry that threat.
More, by keeping people well, vaccines help lift the burden on the health systems that will suffer the strain, in more ways than one, of an increasingly inhospitable planet. By keeping people on their feet, out of hospital and at work, vaccines also help buffer poor families against some of the economic shocks the climate crisis is bringing. In short, vaccines are a life-saving climate adaptation tool – and we need all the tools we can get.
Gavi is raising 9 billion dollars to fund its next five years of work. By its nature, Gavi’s work helps mitigate the demonstrably inequitable danger posed by the warming climate, because, quite simply, getting preventive care to vulnerable people in the poorest countries makes them that much less vulnerable. But Gavi is also meeting the climate threat with targeted foresight. For the first time this year, climate risk is one of the criteria determining which vaccines Gavi will invest in in the upcoming period. The changing climate is changing how humans and disease intersect. We need to be better prepared, and Gavi’s working on that.
Stick with us this week to learn more. In the meantime, please revisit some of our favourite climate change stories from the past couple of years.
The Editors
The deadly diseases that are spiking because of climate change
Outbreaks of infectious diseases are now being linked directly to global warming, with the risk spreading beyond tropical regions to temperate zones too.
Projected impact of climate change to inform which new vaccines receive Gavi support
For the first time in 2024, climate change risk will rank among the criteria informing Gavi’s Vaccine Investment Strategy (VIS) – a shift that landed Gavi policy team staffer Maya Malarski a spot on the Time100 Climate list for 2024.
Brazil rushes out dengue vaccine amid country’s biggest-ever outbreak
Global warming and El Niño together are causing one of the worst outbreaks of dengue the region has ever seen, prompting a rush to roll out vaccines.
Climate change spurs dengue crisis in Bangladesh
With more than 2,000 new dengue patients recorded each day, Bangladesh has converted Dhaka’s dedicated COVID-19 hospital into a dedicated dengue facility.
“It’s difficult, but we’ll find a way”: a new vaccine against typhoid rolls out in a flood-devastated province of Pakistan
Armed with vials of typhoid conjugate vaccine, health workers in Balochistan are doing what they can to protect children threatened by a pincer movement of global crises: antimicrobial resistance on the one hand and climate change on the other.
Could malaria stage a comeback in the US, Europe and elsewhere because of climate change?
The mosquitoes that spread malaria are expanding their geographic distributions because of warming temperatures and altered rainfall patterns.
More from Maya Prabhu
