Background: Climate change increasingly impacts health systems and widens health inequities. It also drives human migration and displacement, and affects the health of migrant and displaced populations, who face financial, legal, and cultural challenges in accessing quality healthcare. Despite the intertwined nature of these phenomena, efforts to build climate-resilient and migrant-sensitive health systems are often isolated. This study identified specific health system interventions that address climate change hazards and the health needs of refugees, migrants, and displaced populations globally.
Methods: A global, scoping review was conducted to identify such interventions documented from 2014 to 2024 in peer-reviewed and grey literature publications. The review included English-language publications describing specific health system interventions addressing climate change and the health needs of refugee, migrant, and displaced populations. These were then further categorized by the World Health Organization health system building blocks framework.
Results: Ninety-five interventions were identified across 56 publications, after screening 3,255 peer-reviewed studies and 3,928 grey literature documents. Although the majority were short-term, reactive responses (e.g., service delivery during climate-related emergencies), some interventions addressed the longer-term health needs of climate-affected displaced and migrant populations, establishing mechanisms which could be sustained beyond a disaster event for protracted or slow-onset crises. The review found new innovative interventions were emerging, but that many familiar, documented interventions can be adapted to meet the needs of migrant populations displaced or otherwise affected by climate change.
Conclusions: While immediate and ad-hoc actions emerged, it is urgent to implement integrated, system-wide approaches to proactively strengthen health systems to improve the health of displaced and migrant populations in a changing climate. Migrant populations must be included when building climate-resilient and environmentally sustainable health systems, as must climate-related considerations when building migrant-inclusive health systems.
