Lab Year
2026
Sector(s)
Environmental management practices, Human health, Livestock health, Health infrastructure
Region
Global
Proponent(s)
Yale University, Smithsonian, University of Michigan, The Nature Conservancy
LOCATING INVESTMENT CASES FOR CLIMATE, HEALTH & NATURE
What
An Investment Taxonomy
This project is applying scientific methods to identify the conditions under which governments, businesses, and financial institutions can capture the health benefits of investing in climate and nature. The project will answer four questions:
1. When are climate adaptation, conservation and restoration part of the least-cost pathway for managing communicable and non-communicable diseases in humans and livestock, and mitigating risks to healthcare systems?
2. How consistently do these interventions perform across geographical contexts?
3. Which institutions are positioned to capture the resulting monetary and non-monetary benefits?
4. How can those benefits be measured and accounted for in systems that drive financial decisions?
It will produce a "living" digital library of interventions that scientific evidence shows will yield positive impact on health, and a taxonomy linking these impacts to investors and the financial instruments at their disposal.
How
Step 1
Global meta-analysis
Rigorous scientific assessment of the impacts of climate adaptation, conservation and ecosystem restoration on: i) human health and productivity, ii) livestock health and productivity, and iii) the operational capacity of public health systems. Aligned with the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework.
Step 2
Who captures benefits?
Data gathered from the meta-analysis will be used to assess which public and private sector organizations are positioned to capture the economic of financial benefits of disease prevention and mitigation of risks to healthcare infrastructure.
Step 3
Alignment with financial instruments
Data from the meta-analysis will also be used to assess the practical alignment between health benefits, beneficiaries and financing mechanisms.
Why
Environmental degradation harms the health of humans and their livestock
Back-correcting degradation through conservation and restoration of ecosystems, or interrupting ecological processes that lead to disease can prevent risks from forming.
Whilst this preventive function is recognized in literature linking ecosystem services to human health, there has been no comprehensive assessment of health impacts across a full suite of climate- or nature-positive management strategies. The ability of different institutions to capture positive impacts — through productivity gains or cost savings, or indirectly through reduced exposure to financial risks, reputational advantages, or political returns — is also unknown.
Governments, businesses, and financial institutions need this information to identify where climate- and nature-positive investments generate benefits they can capture.
Outputs
Investment Taxonomy
Digital Evidence Library
Links documented health impacts to the investors and financial instruments positioned to act on them
Synthesizes a large corpus of scientific evidence on the health impacts of pro-environmental management across ecosytems
Scientific Publications
Data visualizations
Peer-reviewed outputs from the meta-analysis and taxonomy work
Show the distribution of positive and negative effects across interventions and geographies