Health Research Funding

Health research provides the foundation for effective public health and healthcare interventions. As climate change changes the burden of disease, it also affects how health research budgets should be prioritised. New to this year, this indicator uses data from the Dimensions database, covering 8.1 million research grants from more than 700 funders in 44 countries, to estimate the share of health research focused on climate change. Climate-and-health grants are identified using project titles, abstracts, keywords, and Dimensions research classification tags. The focus is on research about climate change impacts on human health, rather than grants on reducing greenhouse gas emissions or mitigation co-benefits. Health-related grants are identified using health keywords and relevant research classifications such as ANZSRC, HRCS, and UoA.

The grant-level data have important coverage limitations, as not all funders publish transparent project information, especially in lower-income countries. As a result, the dataset is dominated by higher-income countries with more transparent research funding systems, while coverage is weak for many countries in Africa, South America, and parts of Asia. The data also capture only project-specific grants, not core institutional or block funding, so total research funding is likely underestimated. Comparisons of absolute funding between countries should therefore be interpreted carefully, as they may reflect different funding models rather than true differences in research priorities. Private-sector health R&D is also excluded, despite representing a large share of global health research. Finally, the keyword and classification-based search strategy may produce false positives and false negatives, and differences in how countries describe grant projects may affect the apparent level of climate-and-health research.