Transforming Systems for Climate & Health Workshop Series
As part of the National Academy of Medicine’s Transforming Systems for Climate & Health initiative, the NAM Global Commission on Reimagining Systems for a Healthier Climate Future convened a two-part, information-gathering workshop series in 2025. These workshops were designed to support the Commission’s charge to articulate a bold, systems-level vision for health-centered climate action—one capable of simultaneously reducing emissions, strengthening climate resilience, and improving human health and well-being.
Across the two sessions, participants explored:
- The core principles that should guide a health-centered approach to systems transformation toward a net-zero, climate-resilient future; and
- The structural levers and pathways with the greatest potential to drive transformative, cross-systems change.
Drawing on diverse global perspectives spanning health, climate science, economics, energy, transportation, social and behavioral sciences, and more, the workshops generated foundational insights into how systems can be reshaped to advance health for all in a changing climate. These learnings informed the scoping of a new National Academies consensus study, Roadmap for Transformative Action to Achieve Health for All at Net-Zero Emissions.
Explore the recording and materials from each workshop below.
The “What” of Systems Transformation: Anchoring Climate Action in Health
April 29 & 30, 2025
Spanning two days, this workshop:
- Reframed climate action through a health-focused lens, examining opportunities and challenges for leveraging health as a strategic anchor point to bridge diverse economic and geopolitical interests
- Illustrated the need for systems transformation by identifying the global economic sectors driving climate change—including energy, transportation, agriculture, and manufacturing, among others—and exploring pathways to net-zero emissions that also maximize health co-benefits
- Explored the economic, political, and social systems shaping sector-specific and cross-sector responses to climate change, and identified the policy, governance, and behavioral shifts required to align economic and sustainability goals with improved health outcomes
Recording
The “How” of Systems Transformation: Strategies and Levers for Health-Centered Climate Action
July 25, 2025 and August 5 – 6, 2025
Across three parts and days, the workshop aimed to:
- Identify the structural levers most critical to accelerating health-centered climate action and understand how these levers interact to drive systems transformation.
- Examine the enabling conditions that shape the feasibility and impact of these levers across diverse country and sectoral contexts.
- Distill real-world strategies and actions that have successfully mobilized these levers, highlighting what made them effective, who played critical roles, and under what conditions they gained traction.
- Surface critical barriers, trade-offs, synergies, and tipping points that shape the path to systems transformation, and distill actionable, cross-sector strategies that enable decision-makers to navigate complexity, align interests, and drive scalable impact.
