At the time of writing, many people around the world are feeling the pain, disruption, and devastating health consequences driven by climate change. The world has been shocked by the widespread flooding in Europe and the consecutive catastrophic hurricanes in North America. Yet far less attention is given to the impacts of climate change in places where Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) works, such as Central African Republic, Chad, Côte d’Ivoire, Democratic Republic of Congo, Myanmar, Niger, Nigeria, and South Sudan. In 2024, these populations have likewise been affected by devastating floods, many of them not for the first time.
Although immediate impacts like injury, displacement, and limited access to healthcare may be similar worldwide, the compounding crises that follow and the capacity to recover from these vary significantly. Individuals in low-resource and humanitarian settings face significant health threats while contributing the least to global emissions. These regions are often vulnerable to climate hazards and possess low adaptive capacity, increasing people’s susceptibility to the negative impacts of climate change.
In this brief, drawing on evidence from indicators in the 2024 report of the Lancet Countdown on Health and Climate Change, MSF teams present examples of how climate change and environmental degradation are making provision of assistance more difficult by amplifying health and humanitarian needs and by further complicating interventions. It also highlights activities that respond to the climate crisis using a three-pillar approach: mitigating MSF’s environmental footprint, adapting healthcare delivery and emergency response to the current and future realities of climate change, and advocating for those impacted.
The complexity of climate change and environmental degradation, coupled with highly politicised and siloed global response efforts often make it insufficiently clear to health and humanitarian implementing partners that every issue is part of a continuous process, where each component informs the others. In this brief, MSF staff outline six focus areas where teams are engaged in developing environmentally-informed health and humanitarian interventions, emphasising their interdependence, and how failure to act on one issue not only impedes progress on that specific component but also affects the entire sequence of subsequent actions.
In a time of polycrisis, a simultaneous occurrence of multiple catastrophic events, MSF and other aid organisations are already struggling to meet the rising health and humanitarian needs. If human activities contributing to climate change and environmental degradation go unabated and unaddressed, including the continued dependence on fossil fuels, these needs will only escalate. With each fraction of a degree of global temperature rise, there will be further limitations on adaptation, and reckless losses and damages to lives, livelihoods, and general well-being.
Drawing on evidence from indicators in the 2023 Report of the Lancet Countdown on Health and Climate Change, MSF builds on previous experiences and messages with a focus on three key areas: MSF’s ongoing efforts to reduce its environmental impact; the challenges of adapting emergency humanitarian operations in a rapidly warming world; and the consequences of climate change when the capacities of communities to adapt are surpassed