A new report from the World Economic Forum (WEF), in partnership with Boston Consulting Group - Building Economic Resilience to the Health Impacts of Climate Change (September 2025) - explores how climate-driven health risks impact the food and agriculture, built environment, health and insurance sectors, and provides recommendations on how to mitigate these.
Human Level’s Take:
- The impacts of climate change on health – encompassing heat-related illnesses and heat stress, mosquito-borne disease, food insecurity, water scarcity, air pollution and other climate-induced risks – are already significant and are on the rise.
- Vulnerable communities around the globe are already bearing the brunt of these health impacts, experiencing 15 times higher mortality from extreme weather events. However, less than 5% of global climate adaptation funding targets health protection.
- Climate health impacts are also a business risk. For the food, built environment, healthcare and insurance sectors, worker capacity losses could be higher than USD $1.5 trillion between 2025 and 2050.
- As the largest employer and controller of capital and supply chains, the private sector is seen as uniquely positioned to set new industry standards and ensure the workforce is not exposed to health risks amid increasing climate change.
- The food and agriculture sector, in particular, is in a position to transform to meet growing global needs for consistently available, healthy foods. The build environment sector can move towards climate-resilient design and retrofitting existing buildings to safeguard communities. In healthcare, there is an opportunity to create climate-resilient medicines, robust care pathways, and improve public health - and to shift to a preventative health approach.
- However, no sector can tackle these risks alone: collaboration for prevention, policy advocacy, shared data systems and innovative financing is needed for true resilience.
Some key takeaways:
- Climate change is not just an environmental concern – it is also a health issue, impacting vulnerable communities the most. Rising temperatures, intensifying extreme weather and worsening air quality don’t just shape our physical environment. They directly threaten people’s health. Unaddressed, they could lead to 14.5 million excess deaths (according to previous WEF estimates) and US$12.5 trillion in economic losses by 2050. These costs will be borne disproportionately by the world’s poorest and most vulnerable, who already face 15 times higher mortality from extreme weather than higher-income regions (over the past decade). Low-income regions face 90% of deaths from climate, weather and water hazards, due to limits in infrastructure, healthcare access and emergency preparedness. However, less than 5% of global climate adaptation funding targets health protection.
- Climate health risks are also business and economic risks. Climate health risks also threaten supply chain resilience, labour productivity, asset resilience and financial systems. Some industries will be especially impacted, as climate health risks directly impact how we build resilient food, infrastructure, healthcare, and insurance systems:
- Food and agriculture: Agricultural workers are expected to be especially impacted by climate-health risks, leading to an estimated US$740 billion reduction in agricultural worker capacity between 2025 and 2050. In addition, an estimated 24 million additional people will face hunger by 2050.
- Built environment: Construction workers are also particularly vulnerable to climate health risks, with at least US$570 billion in working capacity in the sector to be lost to climate-related illnesses between 2025 and 2050. In addition, over half the world’s population live in urban areas with buildings and infrastructure that are poorly adapted for heat, climate risks or air pollution.
- Health and healthcare: The health sector faces both an estimated US$200 billion loss in worker capacity from 2025 to 2050, as well as an additional $1.1 trillion costs in health treatment due to climate change by 2050.
- Insurance: It is estimated that mortality form climate will increase by 0.75% annually by 2050, driving up claims. At the same time, only approximately 8% of people in low-income communities are covered by health insurance.
- Together, the potential loss to worker productivity alone across these sectors could exceed USD 1.5 trillion over the next 25 years.
- From risks to resilience: pathways forward. As the largest employer and controller of capital and supply chains, the private sector is seen as uniquely positioned to set new industry standards and ensure the workforce is not exposed to health risks amid increasing climate change. The food and agriculture sector, in particular, is in a position to transform to meet growing global needs for consistently available, healthy foods. The build environment sector can move towards climate-resilient design and retrofitting existing buildings to safeguard communities. In healthcare, there is an opportunity to create climate-resilient medicines, robust care pathways, and improve public health. Also, there is a need to shift to a preventative health approach. In insurance, there is an opportunity to offer innovative products to address new risks. However, no sector can tackle the climate-health risks alone. Success depends on coordinated action for supportive policies, shared data systems and innovative financing for resilience.
