The Health Co-Benefits of Climate Change Mitigation Policies

The UNESCO Chair in Life Cycle and Climate Change at ESCI-UPF contributed as a co-author to the article «Promoting health through climate change mitigation in Europe,» published in The Lancet Planetary Health journal (2025).

The article proposes an integrated framework for advancing the state of the science on the health co-benefits of climate change mitigation policies in Europe. The framework spans multiple economic sectors -including land use change, forestry and health systems- and provides more granular detail on the type, lever, and agent of change underpinning mitigation actions.

These details are important for:

1. Engaging a diverse range of societal actors by clarifying their potential roles in delivering and benefiting from health co-benefits

2. Guiding the development of new tools and methods to quantify the health co-benefits of climate change mitigation and their distributional impacts

3. Supporting more targeted communication aligned with the incentives and concerns of diverse stakeholders to foster societal support for mitigation actions.

Researchers Ilija Sazdovski and Marta Santamaría from the UNESCO Chair contributed specifically to the health systems dimension of this framework.

This publication is part of the Horizon Europe Catalyse project, coordinated by Cathryn Tonne from ISGlobal. Furthermore, within the project, the UNESCO Chair’s work focuses on climate change mitigation in the health system in the case of Catalonia.

The role of ESCI-UPF is to develop coherent guidance for climate change mitigation strategies and potential trade-offs across environmental impacts for the Catalan Health System.

Activities include reviewing existing methods, engaging stakeholders to co-develop and validate mitigation scenarios, and modelling emission reductions applied in the Catalan health system. Complementarily, training materials will be developed for clinicians, occupational health managers, and public health policymakers, addressing climate-related health risks, workplace hazards, and systemic mitigation strategies.

The Catalyse Project receives funding from the European Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation programme under Grant Agreement number: 101057131 — CATALYSE — HORIZON-HLTH-2021-ENVHLTH-02