A Changing Global Health Architecture and the Governance of Climate-Health

The global health architecture is currently undergoing significant institutional change, with several parallel reform initiatives underway, including UN80, the WHO Joint Process, and other financing processes, set against a broader backdrop of shifting multilateralism and geopolitics. At the same time, climate change is increasingly shaping health risks, health-system resilience, and the broader conditions in which health policy is made and implemented. The Alliance recognizes the need for discussion on how these processes interact with one another, what reforms they aim to achieve, and how the international system and the multilateral order underpinning it, is expected to shift in response.

​The session will examine where different reform processes currently stand and whether the changing global health architecture is well positioned to govern and deliver climate-health action within this evolving geopolitical and multilateral context. This helps map the relationship between institutional reform and implementation, including where responsibilities sit. It also shows how different reform processes interact and whether emerging arrangements are reducing, or potentially reproducing, fragmentation across health, climate, and planetary health agendas.

​The dialogue will take the form of an informal, interactive discussion among facilitators and participants who work directly on these different reform processes, offering a snapshot of reform and critical insights not readily available elsewhere. The discussion will directly feed into the Alliance’s reform tracking initiative, The State of Play.

The discussion would explore the following core questions:

• ​Where does each reform process currently stand in its mandate and timeline, and what key decision points, deadlines, or meetings lie ahead? Is there, or should there be, any connection to the COP31 process?

• ​Given the changing architecture, who approves climate-health action, where does responsibility for implementation sit, and how can accountability be maintained when mandates are distributed across multiple institutions and sectors?

• ​What would constitute credible evidence that reform is moving beyond institutional discussion toward practical change in financing, coordination, country support, and delivery?

​The session is designed for a broad range of members attending UNGA and New York Climate Week, from experts, delegates, and policymakers to civil society and youth, as well as for specialists across the functional areas of health, climate, and governance/diplomacy. The session’s core value lies in its focus on the intersection between health diplomacy and climate diplomacy, an area that reform conversations tend to leave siloed by sector.