Photo by Andriy Ryndych/courtesy of FP Analytics
The health of people and the health of our planet are inextricably linked. And both are under growing threat.
Read our newly published report Future Proofing Health Care: Innovations to Support People and Planet to explore how health care innovations hold transformational potential to improve health outcomes, reduce costs, and expand access to care.
Rising temperatures, polluted air, extreme weather events, and degraded natural systems are already driving illness, deepening health inequalities, and placing unsustainable pressure on health systems globally. At the same time, the health sector itself contributes to the problem - responsible for between 4.4% and 5.2% of global greenhouse gas emissions in recent years.
This is a defining health challenge of our time.
Good health doesn’t begin in hospitals or clinics. It starts long before medical care is needed – good health is grown from the environments we live in, the food we eat, the air we breathe, and the very fabric of our communities around us. These foundations are being steadily eroded by climate change, and without urgent action, the ability to deliver quality care, especially in already vulnerable communities, will only get harder.
At Bupa, we witness this intersection every day. As a global healthcare company supporting over 60 million people worldwide through a network of 50,000 clinicians, we see first-hand how climate impacts are exacerbating health inequalities. This is particularly prevalent in population-dense cities, and emissions-intensive healthcare models built for a different era. Building a healthier future means strengthening the systems, environments, and models that sustain health. It means acting upstream: embedding prevention, reimagining cities, restoring nature, and making resilience and sustainability inseparable from effective healthcare. Digital health innovation can be the driver behind achieving this - providing new, impactful technologies to shift our health models and systems into the future.
At the World Health Assembly this year, together with Foreign Policy Analytics, Bupa convened a diverse group of experts from government, multilateral institutions, the private sector, and civil society to explore the opportunities and actionable strategies to harness specific innovations for a healthier planet and population.
Photo by Andriy Ryndych/courtesy of FP Analytics
Detailing this discussion, our newly published report Future Proofing Health Care: Innovations to Support People and Planet synthesizes the conversation, exploring how health care innovations - such as AI-enabled diagnostics and genomics that support prevention - hold transformational potential to improve health outcomes, reduce costs, and expand access to care. These tools can also help people adapt to climate risks and strengthen the resilience of health systems by reducing the need for emissions-intensive hospital treatments.
The report also acknowledges that innovation must be grounded in real-world needs, designed to reduce - not widen - health inequalities, and must also be implemented with an understanding of potential environmental trade-offs. The report identifies areas for further exploration – how can the health sector now close the implementation gap to move beyond commitment and toward coordination, from pilot projects to scalable models, and from fragmented efforts to collective accountability.
Around the world Bupa is working with others through coalitions including the Sustainable Markets Initiative’s Health Systems Task Force and Sustainable Healthcare Coalition, to chart a course towards these outcomes and build evidence to support insight-driven actions and inform adaptation and build resilience. We’re also working with local partners around the world including Monash University, Universidad Católica de Chile, Universidad de Navarra, Warsaw School of Economics, to the University of Manchester. These partnerships are essential as we collaborate to align industry, government, and civil society around climate-smart health solutions for the benefit of people and planet health.
Read the full report and find out how Bupa is harnessing innovation to enable care that’s more personalised, preventative, resilient and better for both people and planet.
