The Climate Impacts Awards were launched in 2023. To date, Wellcome has funded 22 innovative global projects through this scheme.

The aim of this scheme is to make the impacts of climate change visible across a wide range of physical and mental health outcomes in order to drive urgent climate policy change at scale.

The Climate Impacts Awards incorporate the three key elements of Wellcome’s approach:

• Funding research
• Advocating for policy change
• Engaging with people

By engaging key stakeholders from the outset and embedding different expertise in the research design, we expect that teams will use evidence and impactful narratives on the effects of climate change on health to drive urgent policy change that supports collaborative solutions for climate change adaptation and mitigation.

This scheme aims to make the impacts of climate change on health visible. There are many reasons the impacts of climate change could be invisible.

These include but are not limited to:

• distance: decision makers not being based where the impacts are happening
• ideology: political polarisation results in missing voices, disinformation or lack of information
• unseen: some of the climate impacts of environmental drivers of health outcomes (for example, certain chemicals, pollutants or microscopic organisms) may not be visible and therefore may be ignored
• linkage: the links between climate change and health effects not being explicitly made or understood
• low priority: climate change's effects on health are not given much focus due to competing priorities, unconvincing analyses and communications challenges