Belém Health Action Plan: Climate Data for a Resilient Health

Climate change is now a significant and unavoidable determinant of health. Around the world, health systems are facing ballooning pressure from heat-related illness, shifting disease patterns, air quality degradation, and climate-driven disruptions to food, water, and essential services. For health leaders, the central question has now changed from, “Will climate change affect our work?” to “How quickly can our systems adapt?”

This is the backdrop of the Belém Health Action Plan (BHAP), the first comprehensive framework for climate adaptation for health systems, endorsed and launched at COP30. The plan covers surveillance (data and infrastructure), policy and strategy, governance, and innovation, all grounded in the principles of equity and climate justice. BHAP provides clarity by creating a common, shared direction for climate-health adaptation.

This is the first of three articles in our deep-dive series on the action plan. We provide an overview of BHAP, the action line, why it matters, and what the implications are for your organization.

Overview of the Belém Health Action Plan

The Belém Health Action Plan is a significant global effort to align health systems with the realities of a changing climate. It sets the objective that the health sector must strengthen its climate adaptation and resilience, aiming to anticipate and respond to climate-driven health risks, rather than react once harm has already occurred. 30 countries and and 50 organizations have endorsed the plan and will report on their progress in 2028.

BHAP is organized around three lines of action:

1. Surveillance and monitoring: understanding how climate is influencing health in real time
2. Evidence-based policies, strategies, and capacity building: strengthening institutions and decision-making
3. Innovation, production, and digital health: scaling the technologies and resilient systems needed for the future

Across all three action lines, the Plan emphasizes systems should be:

• Integrated: linking meteorological, environmental, social, and health datasets
• Interoperable: enabling information to move across agencies, sectors, and borders
• Inclusive and participatory: engaging communities, incorporating local and Indigenous knowledge, and centering vulnerable populations as cross-cutting principles
• Continuously evaluated: updated and refined as climate risks evolve and new data becomes available

Action Line 1: Surveillance and monitoring (data and infrastructure)

Action line 1.1

The first action line outlines the transformation required to modernize healthcare intelligence systems for a climate-impacted world. Climate-informed surveillance requires creating new data and methods that enable anticipating, identifying, and addressing the escalating health challenges driven by climate change. It is the foundation for building climate-health resilience and saving lives.

It proposes the following measures:

• Invest in new data infrastructure and establish partnerships between health institutions, meteorological agencies, emergency services, universities, and research centers
• Create integrated data systems that link climate, health, meteorological, and social information to enhance early detection and anticipation of climate-related public health threats
• Develop predictive modeling tailored to local contexts and climates
• Implement early warning systems that translate climate signals into actionable health advisories
• Use disaggregated data to identify how climate risks differ across populations
• Strengthen decision-making for responding to early warning systems and risks
• Integrate adaptation and resilience into all levels of healthcare
• Engage in cross-regional and cross-border collaboration, supported by WHO and ATACH

These proposed measures outline the structural shifts in how our health systems monitor and manage climate risks.

Action line 1.2

Action line 1.2 focuses on helping leaders identify and prioritize climate-related health risks. To build resilience, governments and institutions need clear, evidence-based classification of their most urgent and emerging threats.

It proposes the following measures:

• Develop national lists of climate-related health threats based on scientific evidence and future climate scenarios
• Identify priority diseases, vulnerabilities, and climate-sensitive risks that require surveillance and intervention
• Foster interdisciplinary research to develop new technologies and strengthen prevention, early detection, and treatment of high-priority risks
• Incorporate local, community, and Indigenous knowledge as legitimate evidence sources
• Update risk lists periodically as climate impacts evolve
• Seek guidance from WHO where appropriate to support country-led prioritization
• Facilitate the transfer of knowledge and expertise between countries and contexts

This creates a structured way for health systems to ensure adaptation efforts are strategic, targeted, and grounded in local realities.

Action line 1.3

Action line 1.3 addresses how health systems should prepare, manage, and respond to climate events and emergencies. It emphasizes resilience, flexibility, and equity, especially for communities most vulnerable and exposed to climate impacts.

It proposes the following measures:

• Strengthen institutional capacity for emergency response through coordinated planning and real-time communication and action across sectors
• Create and routinely test contingency plans tailored to local climate hazards and high-risk regions, prioritizing high vulnerability areas and communities
• Promote and establish flexibility in administrative, regulatory, and procurement processes to enable faster emergency responses
• Use climate forecasts to inform operational response protocols, incorporating indigenous, local, and traditional knowledge
• Support equitable health workforce distribution and retention, and create ways to address health workforce shortages, particularly in vulnerable regions
• Develop climate-adaptive emergency plans for Indigenous territories, ensuring culturally appropriate approaches
• Improve logistics, supply chains, and infrastructure resilience for extreme events such as floods, droughts, and wildfires

These proposed measures strengthen the ability of health systems to anticipate and absorb climate shocks, and to protect the communities who will experience these impacts first and most severely.

Why It Matters

Climate-health intelligence is increasingly a determinant of operational continuity and systemic risk.

There are four reasons this action line is central to climate-health resilience:

1. Climate impacts are outpacing traditional care models.

Disease patterns are shifting, heatwaves are becoming more frequent, floods more severe, air quality more volatile. These elements are changing faster than expected. But our current systems are built around reactivity, in which we focus on treating illnesses rather than preventing them.

We can’t react to climate-driven health risks without proactive monitoring and mechanisms.

2. Early detection saves lives and costs.

Heat alerts alone can reduce mortality when paired with targeted public health action. Early detection enables preventative intervention and avoids more advanced, expensive treatment stages. 

The result is often less aggressive, shorter, and cheaper treatments, leading to lower medical expenses for both patients and the healthcare system.

3. Risk is not evenly distributed.

Vulnerable and marginalized populations face disproportionate climate and health burdens, and climate impacts chronic illnesses in different ways. 

Without disaggregated data, our insights will remain too broad, unable to create predictive analytics and preventative interventions, and reinforce inequalities rather than solve them.

4. Resilience requires systemic integration.

Hospital admissions, emergency department staffing, supply chain management, and public health planning all depend on anticipating climate volatility, and none of these functions sit within a single institution. 

Public and private stakeholders need to collaborate and align their data, communication channels, and decision-making processes to ensure that essential supplies, workforce capacity, and critical services remain stable during climate-driven disruptions.

Implications and how to act

The systems, partnerships, and technologies required to build climate resilience take time to design, test, and operationalize. If organizations wait until climate impacts intensify, it will already be too late. The gaps will be larger, the costs higher, and the solutions harder to implement under pressure.

Leaders across sectors need to begin building resilience now. And that means investing in the data infrastructure, operational capacity, and collaborative pathways that will help health systems function amidst a rapidly changing climate.

For governments and institutions

Create the foundational structures: policies, governance, and budgets that make climate-informed health systems a priority. These mechanisms can take a long time to implement and require permanence. Consider how to integrate coordination, data-sharing agreements, and cross-sector planning, as well as how to insulate climate-health resilience from political shifts. Ensure that local knowledge and voices are included and help drive development — it must be a central component of the work.

For private-sector and tech providers

Build the tools, platforms, and digital infrastructure that make predictive insights possible. These solutions require research, development, and integration cycles, and they must be designed in partnership with public institutions, rather than in isolation. Early investment and collaboration will ultimately determine if the technologies are ready when demand surges.

For health systems

Climate risk is now an operational risk. Facilities must begin integrating climate data into staffing, supply chain management, emergency protocols, and patient care models. Preparing operations will reduce the strain and the cost of responding climate events and impacts.

For community organizations and civil society

Communities and local knowledge systems are invaluable. As climate-informed intelligence expands, community networks will be essential in identifying early signals, communicating risks, and ensuring vulnerable populations are not left behind. Get involved in local affairs, demand climate-health action and resilience from political stakeholders, and continue to build robust grassroots movements.

For multilateral organizations and donors

The BHAP offers a shared roadmap, but implementation will require resources, technical support, and sustained political commitment. Investing early in data infrastructure, regional capacity-building, and cross-border collaboration will accelerate progress and reduce long-term costs.

Climate-health resilience cannot be built during crisis. It’s a long-term, systemic investment that demands alignment, collaboration, and foresight across sectors.

Conclusion

The Belém Health Action Plan is an important step for climate-health resilience — it places people and health at the center of climate adaptation. We need to equip our institutions and communities with the tools to adapt to growing risks and impacts, and BHAP provides critical guidance on how to achieve that.

At Groundswell, we’re building part of the foundation that makes this possible. Our infrastructure is data layer designed specifically to quantify climate-health impacts, giving institutions the intelligence they need to anticipate risks, guide investments, and strengthen resilience before crises unfold.

A few questions for you to think about and try to answer, as you consider BHAP:

• How is climate change already impacting your organization or the communities you serve?
• What would you need in place today to prevent those impacts from escalating?
• Where are the biggest gaps in your current data, systems, or coordination?