The world needs to take action to better understand and tackle these crises through education, research, surveillance, political advocacy and more financing.
To minimise the impacts of climate change on antimicrobial resistance, we need to work to mitigate it. The world, and in particular high-income countries that are the most responsible for the climate crisis and have the most resources to fight it, must transition from using fossil fuels to clean, renewable energy.
Alongside mitigation, there’s a need to implement solutions that can help people adapt to living in a changing climate where diseases are widespread. For example, strengthening our health systems to reduce the burden of disease, supporting new research into the intersections of climate and disease, and investing in the ONE Health approach to share data globally and implement joint responses to health threats.
Governments, the private sector and philanthropic funders must also work together and invest long-term in discovering new antimalarial therapeutics, improving equitable access to treatments for drug-resistant infections and improving the global healthcare infrastructure.
At Wellcome, we're funding research into climate and health and infectious diseases, as well as the underexplored intersection of these two health challenges. We’re also backing innovative partnerships like the AMR Action Fund and CARB-X, which invest in delivering new therapeutics that will diagnose, prevent and treat drug-resistant infections.
Antimicrobial resistance and climate change are intimately linked, and while some progress is being made to tackle both problems, the scale of these crises requires faster action on a larger scale.