Legislative Engagement

This indicator measures how far national climate legislation explicitly engages with human health. It captures both general health relevance, where laws mention health outcomes, risks, or systems, and institutional health integration, where health-sector actors such as ministries of health are formally assigned roles in climate governance. The analysis uses the Climate Change Laws of the World (CCLW) legislative dataset and focuses on legally enacted legislative documents, excluding executive policies, strategies, and non-binding instruments. To avoid double counting, related documents such as an original law and its amendments are grouped into a single policy family. The indicator covers legislation from 2000–2025 across 185 countries, tracking the active stock of health-relevant climate laws globally. Active stock is defined as the number of policy families in force in a given year.

The CCLW database is updated monthly, so results may differ depending on the download date; for reproducibility, the version used here was archived on GitHub. Some documents could not be accessed because of broken or missing URLs, and the database may have incomplete coverage for some countries, especially where legislation is not available in English or not systematically submitted. The keyword-based approach identifies whether health is mentioned in climate legislation, but it does not assess the depth, ambition, or implementation quality of those provisions. The indicator also focuses on formal national legislation, so it may miss sub-national laws, administrative regulations, and non-binding policy frameworks. Country-level results should be interpreted carefully where legislative volumes are small, and EU documents are treated separately to avoid double counting with national legislation.