$225 million: Michael Bloomberg, Bill Gates, Chris Hohn, and a circle of philanthropic families turn a climate-and-health promise into protection
Behind the Climate and Health Funders Coalition’s first-year milestone are donors who each arrived at the same conviction by a different road: a warming world is, first and last, a human health story.
Somewhere tonight, a nurse is moving a newborn away from a window because the ward has grown too hot.
A city health officer is watching an air-quality reading climb.
A mother in labor is wondering whether the road to the clinic will flood before morning.
These are the quiet emergencies of a changing climate, the ones that rarely make headlines, and they’re why a remarkable group of philanthropists decided, a year ago in Belém, Brazil, to stop treating climate and health as separate causes.
They pledged $300 million.
Recently in Antalya, as the world gathered for COP31, they came back to report on what they had done with it.
The Climate and Health Funders Coalition has awarded more than $225 million in its first year, three-quarters of the original promise, to 20 programs and counting.
It has also secured $150 million in new commitments from new and returning funders, bringing its total commitments to roughly $450 million, including a matched funding opportunity for initiatives that put clean air first.
Numbers like these can feel abstract.
The people behind them are not.
Consider Michael R. Bloomberg.
Long before this coalition existed, the former New York mayor had made the air people breathe one of his most personal causes.
As the United Nations Secretary-General’s Special Envoy on Climate Ambition and Solutions, he joined London Mayor Sadiq Khan to launch Breathe Cities, an effort to help mayors turn air-quality data into action.
It now spans 16 cities on five continents, and this year he committed another $45 million to expand it, adding Addis Ababa and Madrid.
Participating cities have already reduced toxic nitrogen dioxide pollution by 14 percent. Bloomberg tends to give the credit away.
“Local leaders continue to lead the way in cleaning the air,” he said. “Every step forward helps to save lives.”
His philanthropy, which encompasses all of his personal, foundation, and corporate giving, distributed $4.3 billion last year, and in this coalition it is Antha Williams, who leads its Environment Program, who carries that commitment forward.
“In just one year,” she said, “the Climate and Health Funders Coalition has shown what’s possible when philanthropy comes together.”
Consider Bill Gates, who arrived in Belém having asked the climate community to rethink how it measures success.
On the eve of that summit, he urged leaders to put human welfare at the center of climate strategy and to judge progress not only by emissions and temperature but also by lives improved.
“Our chief goal should be to prevent suffering,” he wrote, “particularly for those in the toughest conditions who live in the world’s poorest countries.”
For the poorest nations, he argued, development is adaptation, and health is among the strongest defenses a family can have against a hotter world.
The coalition reads, in many ways, as that idea put into practice. The Gates Foundation, led by chief executive Mark Suzman under Gates’s direction, was among its founding anchors, and its senior advisor Steve Davis framed the cause simply: every person should have the opportunity to live a healthy, productive life, no matter where they were born.
Consider Sir Chris Hohn, the British investor who in 2002 endowed the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation from the hedge fund he founded the same year and who has since become one of the most generous people in Britain.
He has said that the why of philanthropy is simple: “Every child deserves to be healthy and happy. I stay motivated because it brings me a huge amount of joy to see children flourish.” His foundation committed $1.45 billion to its work last year, its first year above $1 billion, and it came to climate early, recognizing the crisis as one of the greatest threats to children’s futures.
Its chief executive, Kate Hampton, put that conviction into the coalition’s language.
More than one billion children now live with multiple climate risks to their health, development, and well-being, she noted, and alongside cutting emissions, “we must help those already experiencing harm.”
Some of the coalition’s generosity flows from founders whose vision has outlived them and is now held in trust by others.
Ingvar Kamprad started IKEA at 17 and later placed the company he built into a foundation so that its success could serve, in his phrase, “the many people.”
Today the IKEA Foundation devotes its grantmaking to fighting global warming with and for those people, and its Chief Programs Officer, Marilia Bezerra, spoke of a year when families everywhere felt the health toll of extreme heat, poor air, flooding, and displacement.
At Wellcome, the London-based foundation built on the legacy of the pharmaceutical pioneer Henry Wellcome, chief executive John-Arne Røttingen has given the coalition what may be its guiding sentence: “We should judge our success not in degrees Celsius but in lives saved and health improved.”
Wellcome’s director of climate and health, Alan Dangour, stood before delegates in Antalya to share the coalition’s first-year results and remind them, “We should approach climate negotiations as though people’s lives depend on them, because they do.”
The Rockefeller Foundation, which has invested $30 billion over 113 years in humanity’s well-being, brought its long tradition of scientific philanthropy to the effort.
Naveen Rao, its Senior Vice President of Health, has described the coalition as a glimpse of global health’s next era, with funders aligning behind plans that countries set for themselves so communities have what they need before the next shock arrives.
He has also given it a standard to live by: the success of climate finance should be measured not in money pledged, but in lives protected.
Two of the founding anchors embody a newer generation of giving. Quadrature Charitable Foundation was established in 2019 by Greg Skinner and Suneil Setiya, the founders of the investment firm Quadrature Capital, in response to the persistent poverty, inequality, and suffering they saw shaping societies.
Its Managing Director, Masego Madzwamuse, brings more than two decades of work alongside communities in Botswana, Zimbabwe, and South Africa, and she speaks of those communities not as recipients but as leaders.
“Those communities are already leading the way in adapting,” she said, “but the gaps are too large for any single funder to close.”
From Singapore, Philanthropy Asia Alliance, created by Temasek Trust, adds the voice of a region home to more than half the world’s people.
Its chief executive, Shaun Seow, has set the coalition’s most ambitious horizon: “to move from protecting hundreds of thousands of people to reaching hundreds of millions.”
Then there are the families who joined this year, perhaps the clearest sign that the idea is spreading. In New Delhi, the Nand and Jeet Khemka Foundation, named for Nand Khemka, the patriarch of the SUN Group, and his wife, Jeet, has been one of India’s few philanthropies devoted to climate change for three decades, under the stewardship of their son Uday Khemka.
Dr. Nitya Mohan Khemka, a public health scholar who advises the foundation and has written on how India must protect its most vulnerable people from heat, describes the crisis in the most human terms: lost wages, overwhelmed hospitals, lives cut short.
“For decades, our work on climate has been rooted in a simple belief,” she said. “Lasting change comes from collective action and strong policy, not isolated efforts. We are proud to join it.”
Laudes Foundation, founded by the Brenninkmeijer family business owners on six generations of entrepreneurship and philanthropy, brings the perspective of people who know industry from the inside.
Its chief executive, Leslie Johnston, believes philanthropy is uniquely suited to this moment because it can take the long view and embrace risk, and she has a clear message for business: protecting workers from extreme heat is a cost of doing business in a hotter world.
And from Denmark, the Novo Nordisk Foundation, established in 1924, brings a scientist’s attention to people too often overlooked.
Its Chief Scientific Officer for Health, Flemming Konradsen, points out that extreme heat falls hardest on those living with heart disease, diabetes, and related conditions, making their care a matter of equity as much as medicine.
What these donors have funded is, by design, close to the ground.
The Clean Air Fund, a longtime partner in Bloomberg’s Breathe Cities, is helping governments and grassroots groups alike gather air-quality data and turn it into policy. DHIS2, the open-source health information platform used by ministries across Africa and Asia, is bringing climate data into the systems clinicians already rely on, so a district can see a heatwave or a dengue season coming.
The Global Heat Health Information Network gathered more than 600 of the world’s leading heat experts in Bangkok this year to turn science into heat-health plans.
The Super Pollutant Action Alliance is working to cut the pollutants that warm the planet fastest.
In Africa, the WISER program is putting reliable weather and climate information in the hands of the people making local decisions.
And through Nexa, an initiative led by Grand Challenges Canada with the Science for Africa Foundation and the Asian Venture Philanthropy Network, the coalition is backing local innovators who build early-warning systems and climate-smart diagnostics for the health workers on the front line.
It is philanthropy that trusts the people closest to a problem to solve it.
The donors are candid that their gifts cannot meet the need alone.
Brazil’s health minister, Alexandre Padilha, noted in Antalya that international public funding for health adaptation fell from about $3.2 billion in 2022 to $2.2 billion in 2024.
In that light, private generosity that moves quickly, takes risks governments cannot, and aligns behind shared plans like the Belém Health Action Plan carries an importance well beyond its size.
None of the donors have said how much each contributed, choosing instead to present the work as one shared effort.
That choice may be the most telling detail of all.
The coalition’s next chapter is already taking shape.
It will soon establish an independent secretariat led by its first permanent executive director, and it has been inviting community and sector leaders to help steer its strategy so that the people it serves have a say in how it serves them.
Madzwamuse’s hope, that more funders will follow, reads less like a press release flourish than an open door.
A year ago, the promise was $300 million.
The truer measure is harder to count and easier to picture: a ward that stays cool through the heatwave, a warning that reaches a village in time, a city where a child takes a cleaner breath.
That is the standard these donors have chosen for themselves. By their own measure, the work has only begun.