Global Fund: 40% of country funding requests are now climate-related

The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria announced that 70% of its funding will be spent in 50 of the most climate-vulnerable countries globally over the next three years. Part of the funding will go towards helping countries develop more resilient health systems through activities like digitizing health records so they don’t get lost during floods and reducing their health risks to climate change. Peter Sands, executive director of the fund, told Devex that there’s been an increase in countries asking for more support in these areas. “We are seeing what countries want from us is changing in response to climate change. I think about 40% of what we call funding requests, which are essentially a country's expression of what it wants to spend its country allocation on, about 40% of them have explicit considerations of climate change-related needs,” Sands said. “We work on a three-year cycle. If I'd gone back three years, I reckon that percentage would have been a single-digit percentage. So there's been a massive uptick,” he added. Increased investments A big focus of the fund’s climate change-related work is malaria, which is highly climate-sensitive. Sands said they’re heavily focused on expanding seasonal malaria chemoprevention — giving children antimalarial medicines in monthly intervals during a season when malaria is known to spike — which he said is very cost-effective in protecting children up to five years old from severe malaria. “It provides, roughly speaking, about a 60% protection for on average about $3.60,” he said. Another area they’re increasing investments in is disease surveillance, which is helpful not just to fight existing diseases, but also for new pandemic threats as it can serve as an early warning system, Sands said. “If we want to have an equitable response to climate change, we've got to invest in stopping the problem [from] getting worse.” --— Peter Sands, executive director, The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria “If you're going to have a cyclone or something hitting you, you start linking that to your malaria data, and understanding where you need to be taking preventative action,” he said. The fund is also looking at improving supply chains, through initiatives like using solar-powered air conditioning to protect medicines from degradation. Sands said many medicines left in temperatures above 40 degrees Celsius deteriorate. But many medicines sitting in warehouses and health care facilities are only placed in cupboards. Not all require the introduction of technology. Other ways they are helping protect the health supply chain include putting medicines on higher ground to protect them from potential floods. “Because what we've seen in a lot of these extreme weather events is one of the first things that happen is you lose a lot of really valuable medicines,” Sands said. Not doing enough The Global Fund’s announcement comes amid increased recognition of the harms climate change is causing to health, yet investments remain small compared to the need. The World Health Organization estimates the direct damage costs of climate change to health to be between $2 billion and 4 billion per year by 2030. But less than 2% of multilateral climate finance currently goes to health projects. “I'm afraid when you look at the fact that say almost 12,000 people die every week of malaria, and over 75% of those are children under the age of five, and that number is not going down, and it's quite likely to go up, it's hard to say that we're doing enough,” Sands said. Sands said it’s “a kind of cruel irony” that a child in Malawi or Chad who has barely contributed to global carbon emissions is on the front line of climate change. “If we want to have an equitable response to climate change, we've got to invest in stopping the problem getting worse. But we also ought to invest in protecting those who had nothing to do with creating the problem, but are the ones most likely to die because of it,” he said.