Climate change adaptation: Where does global health fit in the agenda?

Adapting to climate change is now seen as a core component of our climate change response arsenal. This is because, unfortunately, climate change mitigation strategies alone will not prevent adverse events resulting from existing climate change; we are now too far down the climate change road to avoid the repercussions of more severe weather events, changes to agricultural yields, conflict and displacement, and the health effects that arise from all of these impacts. Although adaptation has received much attention, both practically and in climate change research in the last decade or so, climate change adaptation for health has only recently begun to emerge in the public health literature and policy discourse. The objectives of this paper are to: i) outline the relevance of climate change adaptation to global health, ii) highlight the importance of linking the social determinants of health and sustainable development agendas with climate change adaptation measures, iii) provide an overview of the global health and climate change adaptation activities thus far, and present some examples of activities relevant to health, and iv) describe the (constantly evolving) main adaptation financial mechanisms for developing countries and implications of these for global health. The paper concludes by arguing that the global health community can use the opportunities provided by the increasing flow of funding to climate adaptation to address existing and future health burdens.Adapting to environmental variability has been a focus of anthropological study since the early 1900s [1]. The term adaptation was first applied to the study of the consequences of human-induced climatic change in the 1990s. Adaptation is generally understood to mean an adjustment in social-ecological systems in response to environmental changes and their impacts. A central goal of adaptation is the development of adaptive capacity, without which, adaptation is less likely to occur. Adaptation strategies mu