Climate Impacts Awards: Unlocking urgent climate action by making the health effects of climate change visible

The aim of this scheme is to make the impacts of climate change visible across a wide range of physical and mental health outcomes in order to drive urgent climate policy and practice change at scale. This scheme will fund transdisciplinary teams to deliver short-term, high-impact projects, combining evidence generation with communications and/or public engagement.

Scheme at a glance 

This scheme is now closed

Lead applicant career stage:
Administering organisation location:
Anywhere in the world (apart from mainland China)
Frequency:
Annual
Funding amount:

Up to £2.5 million. In exceptional cases we may award above this. 

Funding duration:

Up to 3 years

Coapplicants:
Accepted

About this scheme 

We will fund transdisciplinary teams that may include researchers, policymakers, practitioners, community stakeholders, communications, and public engagement experts with capacity to use evidence to drive climate action. By engaging decision-makers from the outset we expect that teams will increase the profile of the evidence, advance impactful narratives on the effects of climate change on health and use these to drive urgent policy and practice change at scale.  

This will include generating and synthesising evidence (including across multiple sites/countries) on under-researched but significant health issues arising from climate impacts that fill a policy and practice-relevant evidence gap and/or present localising knowledge to specific contexts where evidence is missing. Funded projects should engage affected populations and communities, policy makers and/or practitioners in the framing, delivery, and/or communication of the research.  

We will prioritise funding for research that serves the expressed needs of at-risk populations and communities with high exposure and vulnerabilities to the health impacts of climate change. In this context, vulnerability may result from the intersection of factors such as geography, socio-economic status, demography, gender, race, ability, ethnicity, co-morbidities and occupation.

There are many reasons the impacts of climate change could be invisible. These include but are not limited to:

  • distance: decision makers not being based where the impacts are happening
  • ideology: political polarisation results in missing voices; disinformation or lack of information
  • chemistry: climate impacts on environmental drivers of health outcomes may not be visible to the naked eye. For example, pollutants that result from flooding
  • linkage between climate change and health impacts not being explicitly made
  • lack of priority of health impacts because populations are overfamiliar with the problem
  • lack of metrics to be able to measure certain things and a lack of data needed to quantify the impacts
  • communications challenges: lack of accessibility, jargon heavy science language, health impacts not making headlines.

Eligibility and suitability 

About your proposal 

What we offer 

How to apply 

Log in to our online grants system. You can save your application and return to it any time.

Key dates 

You must submit your application by 17:00 BST on the deadline day. We don’t accept late applications. 

Open to applications

  1. 20 February 2023, 13:00 UTC

    Webinar

    Watch recording
  2. 13 April 2023

    Full application deadline

  3. July 2023

    Final funding decisions

Contact us 

Useful documents