CFR

The Burroughs Wellcome Fund serves and strengthens society by nurturing a diverse group of leaders in biomedical sciences to improve human health through education and powering discovery in frontiers of greatest need.

The fund invites applications for its Climate Change and Human Health Seed Grants program, which aims to stimulate the growth of new connections between scholars working in largely disconnected fields who could together change the course of climate change’s impact on human health. Small, early-stage grants of between $2,500 and $50,000 will be awarded through the program.

BWF is mainly but not exclusively interested in activities that build connections between basic/early biomedical scientific approaches and ecological, environmental, geological, geographic, and planetary-scale thinking, as well as population-focused fields, including epidemiology, public health, demography, economics, and urban planning. Also of interest is work piloting new approaches or interactions toward reducing the impact of health-centered activities, such as developing more sustainable systems for health care, care delivery, and biomedical research systems. Another area of interest is preparation for the impacts of extreme weather and other crises that can drive large-scale disruptions that immediately impact human health and healthcare delivery. Public outreach, climate communication, and education efforts focused on the intersection of climate and health are also appropriate for this call.

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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 and practice change at scale. This scheme will fund transdisciplinary teams to deliver short-term, high-impact projects, combining evidence generation with communications and/or public engagement. By engaging decision-makers from the outset we expect that teams will increase the profile of the evidence, advance impactful narratives on the effects of climate change on health and use these to drive urgent policy and practice change at scale.

This will include generating and synthesising evidence (including across multiple sites/countries) on under-researched but significant health issues arising from climate impacts that fill a policy and practice-relevant evidence gap and/or present localising knowledge to specific contexts where evidence is missing. Funded projects should engage affected populations and communities, policy makers and/or practitioners in the framing, delivery, and/or communication of the research.

Wellcome Trust will prioritise funding for research that serves the expressed needs of at-risk populations and communities with high exposure and vulnerabilities to the health impacts of climate change. In this context, vulnerability may result from the intersection of factors such as geography, socio-economic status, demography, gender, race, ability, ethnicity, co-morbidities and occupation.

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