History of the Climate Grand Challenge
The Climate Grand Challenge did not begin with a launch; it began with a convergence. What emerged between 2018 and 2023 was a steadily constructed architecture, built through convenings, planning bodies, workshops, pilot grants, publications, and collaborative networks.
2018-2019
Big Ideas Taking Shape: Climate Emerges as a Strategic Priority
The signal was clear: this was not a passing interest but a growing field of committed leaders across disciplines.
2019-2020
From Concept to Framework: The Planning Committee and Program Design
Consensus formed around a unifying ambition: to improve and protect health and well-being by transforming systems that both contribute to and are impacted by climate change.
2020-2021
Building the Architecture: Early Implementation
This period was characterized by iterative design: testing models, identifying gaps, and aligning partners.
2021-2023
Operationalizing the Vision: Launching Programs
What began as a forward-looking idea has entered a new phase, one defined by measurable impact, sustained collaboration, and scalable solutions for climate and health.
“We do not wait until we are called on to act. Instead, we move proactively to catalyze collective action among the diverse stakeholders who hold the levers for change.” – Victor J. Dzau, President, National Academy of Medicine
Areas of Impact
Uniting the Health Sector to Act on Climate
The health sector accounts for approximately 8.5% of US carbon emissions, making it both a contributor to climate change and uniquely positioned to lead in protecting the nation’s health from climate impacts. The Climate Collaborative, launched in 2021, was established to align health sector leaders around collective goals and actions to reduce emissions and advance sustainability, based on evidence, shared solutions, and a commitment to improve health.
This program brings together health and hospital systems, clinicians, private payers, suppliers, industry, academia, and nonprofits, with the private and public sectors, to tackle a challenge no single institution can solve alone. It is structured around four priority areas and serves as a neutral platform for collaboration and coordination, and translates climate ambition into measurable progress across the health sector.
Building Momentum
40%
growth in Action Collaborative membership from Phase 1 to Phase 2
85
organizations engaged, spanning health systems and hospitals, professional societies, payers, suppliers, nonprofits, academia, and community partners.
107
working group members
Tools and Resources
Step-by-step pathways that help organizations start where they are and move forward with on their own pace while leveraging best practices, resources, and toolkits.
A practical shortlist of priority actions for hospital and health system leaders to cut emissions across core operational high impact areas and set a clear starting point for decarbonization planning, implementation, and accountability.
A clinician-facing shortlist of immediate, doable steps—paired with system-level actions to champion with leadership—that helps health professionals reduce waste and emissions in day-to-day care while building momentum for broader sustainability practices in their settings.
A webinar series that fosters peer learning through resource sharing and network building to address climate and health priorities and needs across regions within the U.S.
A webinar series that dives into niche topics designed to support practical action, paired with curated resources organizations can use immediately.
A national movement catalyzed through the Climate Collaborative to mobilize health-related organizations across the country and beyond.
Local Leadership, National Reach
The Climate Communities Network (CCN) exists to back local leaders working at the intersection of climate and health, connecting them, and helping them get the support they need. CCN is NAM’s community-led network within the Climate Grand Challenge, built in recognition of lived experience as expertise and with the aim of linking local solutions to national partnerships that can enable and extend those impacts.
CCN is proving a simple point: when community leadership is resourced and connected, progress becomes practical, quantifiable, and built to last.
CCN – Ethos & Partnerships
Partnerships in Practice
CCN enables community-led solutions to grow stronger through connection and transparency. The network prioritizes trust, co-design, and bidirectional learning, in part by linking local leaders to Strategic Partners and opportunities that can augment and accelerate impact in their communities.
Community-Led by Design
Members shape and inform priorities and activities through governance structures and collective decision-making. Lived experience is treated as expertise, with deliberate inclusion across geographies, populations, and organizational size. A key feature of the CCN is its commitment to shifting power to communities. Importantly, the CCN was co-developed through a flipped power model, with core program components (e.g., governance structure) decided/informed by the inaugural cohort.
Seed Funding as Signal and Catalyst
Direct financial support that affirms community expertise and accelerates early outcomes, from new programs to trainings and youth-led initiatives.
Bridging Local and National
NAM’s platform helps connect Members to funders, policymakers, and national partners. Strategic Partners amplify and support, while Members keep the work grounded in local realities.
Collective + Individual Progress
The CCN is a strong example of a replicable and scalable public/private/CBO partnership model for bridging the gap that often exists between health and environmental justice efforts at multiple geographic levels. As evidenced by its early success, the CCN provides a platform for community-centered consensus building around promising, effective, and sustainable practices for reducing climate-related health inequities nationwide
Impact at a Glance
In 2024 and 2025, CCN paired partnership with direct investment and tangible outputs, backing community leaders with seed funding, peer learning, and a clear path from priorities to progress.
18
Community-based organizations selected and actively participating
$195,000
funds deployed directly to
member communities
70+
total connections made
between members and
strategic partners
Health is the Message that Travels
For too many years the framing of the climate crisis has lacked sufficient messaging that it is primarily a human health issue, rather than solely an environmental or energy problem. The Grand Challenge aims to elevate the messaging around the health consequences of climate change, the opportunities available as sectors transitions, highlight solutions that deliver immediate health and financial benefits, and convene to catalyze action across sectors.
This workstream pairs credible communication, trusted resources, and high visibility convenings, putting this work at the center of national moments where climate and health leaders align, build partnerships, and accelerate progress.
Where the Field Gathers, NAM Leads
From Evidence Gaps to Action-Ready Research
Research on climate and health is urgently needed to shed light on the mechanisms behind health impacts, demonstrate efficacy of adaptation and mitigation strategies, and improve predictive capabilities.
Closing these gaps will be essential to identifying climate impacts on specific populations, predicting the impacts of climate on health, and developing targeted solutions.
A Research Agenda to Protect Human Health and Build Resilience in the Face of a Changing Climate
This publication was developed with the aim of advancing scientific understanding and shaping effective interventions and policies related to climate and health.
Four priority research domains
01
Climate impacts on health and related costs
Clarify how climate hazards affect health outcomes and economic burdens and improve the ability to attribute and anticipate risk.
02
Resilience strategies that work
Build evidence on mitigation and adaptation approaches that reduce health harm and strengthen critical systems.
03
Data, tools, and capacity
Improve surveillance, technology, and workforce readiness so communities and health systems can act on timely, usable information.
04
Policy and public engagement
Strengthen the link between science and action through effective governance, communication, education, and two-way engagement.
Regional hubs, locally led
R&I Global Research Hubs
In 2024, NAM launched its first regional research and innovation hub in Kathmandu, Nepal, convening cross-sector leaders to align on priority research needs and actionable opportunities at the intersection of climate change, health, and lived community realities across South and Southeast Asia. In 2025, NAM expanded the model to the Caribbean, bringing regional and global partners together in Barbados to identify gaps and accelerate locally relevant research, training, and collaboration.
From Ambition to Transformative Action
The Transforming Systems initiative represents the long-term systems agenda of the NAM’s Climate Grand Challenge, moving beyond incremental, siloed solutions to reimagine how economic, governance, and social systems can be redesigned to deliver health, equity, and resilience in a changing climate. Though early in its lifecycle, it has already established a credible global vision and positioned the NAM as a convening hub for cross-sector, health-centered climate leadership.
Building the Roadmap for Climate Action
In 2026, the NAM and broader National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM), launched a consensus study to develop a Roadmap for Transformative Action to Achieve Health for All at Net-Zero Emissions.
What it is
The consensus study is the National Academies’ gold standard for producing independent, evidence-based, policy-relevant guidance on complex challenges, and the only mechanism through which the Academies make formal recommendations.
Over a 12-month period, the study is producing a principles-based, context-responsive framework that is globally relevant and locally adaptable, helping decision-makers align mitigation and adaptation strategies with improved health, equity, well-being, and inclusive economic resilience—grounded in systems thinking, the best available evidence, and real-world, case-based insights.
What the roadmap will provide
- A decision framework to support priority-setting for policy and investment decisions across sectors, scales, and geographies
- Implementation-oriented and cross-cutting guidance on high-impact leverage points and how to navigate trade-offs transparently and proactively
- Practical recommendations, supported by case-based exemplars, that demonstrate the conditions and differentiated pathways to translate systems change ambition into transformative action
- A foundation to mobilize partnerships, financing, and action aligned with health, well-being, resilience, and equity outcomes
Future Impact
Following publication in early 2027, the NAM will lead implementation, working with a global network of partners to put the Roadmap to use in real world decision environments, enabling locally owned and drive actions that, together, compound into transformative systems change needed to improve health and well-being, reduce inequities, and build lasting resilience for generations to come.
Worldwide Collaboration that Strengthens Action at Home
Climate and health challenges do not acknowledge borders, and neither can the solutions. NAM’s global initiatives extend the Climate Grand Challenge, not to replace national leadership, but to strengthen it. By partnering with peer academies and investing in future leaders, NAM is translating global collaboration into practical actions, durable relationships, and shared capacity that can accelerate progress across the climate and health field.
What Global Collaboration Made Possible
The value of this work is leverage. NAM’s global partnerships create shared direction, test new models of leadership, and produce tools that funders and institutions can use immediately.
Sustainable health research, led by future leaders
NAM and UKAMS operated as equal partners and placed emerging leaders at the center of agenda-setting and authorship. The result was For People, For Planet: Improving the Environmental Sustainability of Health Research, a policy report designed to move sustainability from aspiration to practice across the research ecosystem. Its recommendations span the full set of levers that shape research culture and operations, including funding incentives, regulation, procurement, infrastructure, data and metrics, and capacity building.
Global Coalition of Academies of Medicine on Climate and Health
Launched in late 2025, the Coalition brings together national academies and medical divisions to strengthen the scientific foundation for climate and health action and support practical, context-specific implementation. The Coalition issued a joint statement in support of Brazil’s Belém Health Action Plan at COP30 and is aligned around priority areas that help translate evidence into action, including surveillance and monitoring, evidence synthesis and capacity building, and innovation and sustainable production.
The Climate and Health Future We Build Together
The next several years must be defined by continued alignment, action, and accountability.
Our vision is for climate and health is to stand as a permanent pillar of public health driven by durable institutions who sustain pipelines of talent, funding, innovation, knowledge and action.
The CGC will ultimately be measured not only by the number of convenings and reports, but by the strength of the institutions and collaborations built, the durability of the pipelines created, the achievements made through our collective action, and the extent to which communities experience real improvements in health and resilience.
The health harms of climate change are well documented and are already affecting human health. Our responsibility is to stand firmly for science and advancing the health for everyone, everywhere.
Where We’re Headed Next
Scale what works.
Expand adoption of proven tools and models across the health sector and beyond, making it easier for organizations at every starting point to take meaningful steps forward.
Strengthen the connectors.
Build relationships and shared infrastructure that allow progress to travel, including peer learning, standards that reduce burden, and platforms that align stakeholders around common goals.
Invest in communities and future leaders.
Deepen community-led work and expand leadership pipelines so solutions are grounded in lived experience and built to adapt.
Advance research that accelerates impact.
Use the research agenda and regional hubs to align investment with the highest-value gaps, strengthen locally led innovation, and speed translation from evidence to action.
Reimagine systems for a healthier climate future.
Move from vision to actionable guidance that helps leaders across sectors make smarter decisions, anticipate trade-offs, and mobilize financing and partnerships at scale.
An Invitation to Shape the Next Phase
The Climate Grand Challenge is designed as a platform, not a standalone program. Its impact grows when partners bring their expertise, influence, and investment to the table. The next phase will be shaped by the organizations that choose to build it with NAM, helping climate and health progress go farther and last longer.
