The Lancet Planetary Health, May 2025

Promoting health through climate change mitigation in Europe

Several EU climate change mitigation policies have the potential to deliver health co-benefits. However, existing frameworks guiding research in this area lack important details that are needed to understand how evidence of health co-benefits can be used to support the ambition and acceptability of EU climate policy.

In this Personal View, we propose an integrated framework for advancing the state-of-the-science on health co-benefits of climate change mitigation and realising the societal effect of evidence documenting co-benefits. We apply this framework to the EU context. Our framework spans multiple economic sectors—including land use, land-use change, and forestry and health systems—and provides details on the different types of mitigation actions, levers of change, and societal actors with the agency to implement specific mitigation actions.