Since late 2025, Southern Africa has been battered by a relentless chain of climate shocks. Devastating floods swept through Mozambique, Malawi, Zambia, and Angola between December and January, killing at least 280 people and affecting nearly a million more. Tropical Cyclone Gezani followed in February, compounding the destruction before communities had any chance to recover. Meanwhile,Southern and Eastern Africa accounted for more than half of global cholera cases in 2025—a direct consequence of the flooding, displacement, and overwhelmed health systems that climate shocks leave in their wake.Across the continent, 56% of all public health events recorded between 2001 and 2021 have been linked to climate change, and the trend is accelerating.
And yet, for all the money, research, and political attention being directed at climate response, one of the most powerful levers for change remains consistently underfunded: the people on the ground who are working to address it.
When Climate and Health Collide
Climate change acts as a threat multiplier. It takes existing health challenges and makes them worse, often at an accelerated rate. Warmer temperatures expand the range of diseases like malaria, while shifting rainfall patterns drive food insecurity, waterborne illness, and displacement—each of which feeds back into the others. In East and Southern Africa, where health systems are already stretched and climate vulnerability is high, these compounding effects hit harder than in most other parts of the continent.
UNICEF has warned that 45 million children in the region are at risk of poor health, malnutrition, and displacement as climate patterns intensify. WHO projects that climate change will cause approximately 250,000 additional deaths globally per year between 2030 and 2050. And Africa—which contributes less than 1% of the world’s energy-related carbon emissions—faces a projected 60–80% increase in climate-related death rates by 2030, more than any other region on earth.
A Gap in the Response
Most conversations about climate and health focus on infrastructure like better early warning systems, more resilient hospitals, renewable energy for health facilities. These things are necessary, but there’s another gap that gets far less attention—one that shapes whether any of those infrastructure investments actually work.
That gap is leadership.
Right now, there’s a significant divide between what researchers know about climate and health and what health systems are actually doing about it. Experts across Africa have named this directly, pointing to the need for accelerated leadership, governance, and financing to support integrated, climate-informed health responses.Africa CDC’s own 2025 Strategic Framework on Climate Change and Health identifies strong institutional capacity as essential to progress. It’s clear that the knowledge exists, but the human infrastructure to act on it does not yet match the scale of what’s needed.
Turning research into policy, designing programs that account for climate risk, and coordinating across health, agriculture, and environmental systems require people who know how to lead in complex, under-resourced environments. Health systems won’t become climate-resilient through better technology alone. They need leaders who can integrate climate thinking into everyday planning and decision-making, shifting from reactive crisis response to proactive, anticipatory design.
That shift must come from people who know their communities, understand their systems, and have the skills and networks to drive change from the inside.
Leadership Is Infrastructure
The effectiveness of any strategy depends on the ability of communities to work together and implement solutions that fit their specific contexts. That kind of coordination doesn’t emerge on its own. It’s built by people with skills, relationships, and the institutional standing to bring others along.
Young professionals across East and Southern Africa are already working at the intersection of climate and health. Many of them are doing extraordinary work within health ministries, community clinics, research institutions, and NGOs navigating the overlapping realities of the climate crisis. What they often lack is access to the leadership development, mentorship, peer networks, and platforms that turn individual talent into systems-level change. When those supports are provided, the returns compound. A well-equipped leader shapes their organization, mentors the next generation, and influences policy.
A Partnership Putting This Into Practice
This is the thinking behind a new partnership between Global Health Corps (GHC) and the Elsevier Foundation, announced as part of GHC’s 2026–2027 Africa Leadership Accelerator (ALA). For the first time, GHC will integrate a climate and health focus within its ALA cohort—selecting and supporting six emerging leaders who are working at the intersection of health and climate resilience across Malawi, Rwanda, Uganda, and Zambia.
Over nine months, these fellows will receive leadership training, executive coaching, mentorship, in-person retreats, and hands-on community projects designed to build the skills and networks needed to drive change. Through the Elsevier Foundation partnership, fellows will also engage with researchers, practitioners, and policymakers, helping to close the gap between evidence and action that holds so many health systems back.
What It Actually Takes to Future-Proof Our World
Over decades, global health has learned that lasting change doesn’t come from the outside in. Solutions designed without the people they’re meant to serve—however well-funded or well-intentioned—consistently fall short. Climate-health is no different. If anything, it’s where that lesson is most urgent.
Building a world that can withstand the compounding pressures of climate change and public health emergencies will take influence, financing, technology, and infrastructure. But it will also take something harder to fund and easier to overlook: a generation of leaders who are equipped not just to respond to crises, but to help redesign the systems that leave communities exposed to them.
Those leaders exist. Many of them are already doing the work. The question is whether we’re ready to invest in them the way this moment demands.