From wealth gaps to climate costs: why global health matters
Harvard professor Vanessa Bradford Kerry discusses the importance of global health at MIT
Pandemics. Climate change. Inequity. War. Political upheaval. Associate Professor of Environmental Health Vanessa Bradford Kerry MD of Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health identified these as some of the most pressing problems humanity faces today, stressing how each issue poses an existential threat to millions of lives.
“At the core of all this, though,” Kerry emphasized, “is health.”
Kerry, who is also the CEO of Seed Global Health and the Special Envoy for Climate Change and Health for the World Health Organization (WHO), gave a talk at MIT on Nov. 3 to discuss the critical nature of health in many of the world’s dilemmas.
“Health is critical to our economy [and] poverty,” Kerry said. She discussed how everything from potable water and food access to microplastic pollutants and gender inequality could be traced back to the health condition of a society.
“But the problem is,” she continued, “the decisions that we make don’t always reflect the reality of the world that we live in.” Kerry then outlined the specific decisions that gave rise to many of humanity’s current problems, as well as how prioritizing health is the first essential step to resolving them.
When the wealth gap becomes the health gap
Kerry drew the audience’s attention to the world’s struggle with rampant poverty. With a global population of at least 8.2 billion, well over a billion people can be considered poor. About half of the world lives on $7 a day. However, this increase in poverty coincides with a rapid consolidation of wealth around the world, with the richest 1% of people having a higher net worth than about 95% of the global population.
“And [this] isn’t a ‘today’ phenomenon,” Kerry emphasized. “[It’s] reflecting years of history, years of racism… That income might be shifting, but the actual wealth, assets, and opportunities that come with that remain deeply consolidated in certain places.”
Kerry then discussed the extensive consequences of this inequity. As the world’s most impoverished sink deeper into poverty, their health and wellbeing becomes less of a priority compared to the debts they must pay off. Nonetheless, it’s in everyone’s best interest to prioritize health as a global public good. Kerry condemned how people compete for access to healthcare as a consequence of the wealth gap, particularly emphasizing that well-being has never been a zero-sum game; one socioeconomic group can thrive without sacrificing another.
According to the WHO’s Commission on Macroeconomics and Health, about “a quarter of the [economic] growth… in low- [and] middle-income countries from 2000 to 2011 was [directly] from investments in health.” Kerry highlighted this to illustrate how health investments can drive the economy, forecasting a potential 40 million new jobs in the medical sector by 2030.
The benefits of this growth would be expansive; for example, many of these new jobs would provide women with employment opportunities, as “women are often on the front line of the caregiving,” according to Kerry. Additionally, each new paid position in the health industry would give rise to about 3.4 jobs in related sectors.
Kerry then reflected on how her own upbringing influenced her position on the wealth and health gaps. “I am very privileged that I grew up in a house of two public servants that were very dedicated to the world,” she said, referencing her father, former Secretary of State John Kerry. As a result, Kerry became motivated to use her platform to help others.
Global health and the financial cost of climate change
Kerry then addressed climate change, which is expensive and becoming harder for countries to ignore. “Climate change is driving disease burdens globally,” she said, citing how issues such as poor maternal health and parasitic infections can be traced back to this larger topic. The rising costs of global climate change, along with the cumulative years of life and productivity lost, make it an increasingly costly burden for all nations.
Furthermore, Kerry noted the large-scale consequences of climate change, calling it a vicious cycle. Whereas wealthier countries like the United States have the funding necessary to mitigate its effects, poorer nations end up falling farther behind and bear the burden of a crisis they are seldom responsible for.
Kerry then detailed how health investments can reduce the substantial money countries spend on climate change. “If you just put three extra dollars a year per person toward health, you could save 12 million lives, prevent 28 million heart attacks, add 150 million healthy life years, and have over a trillion dollars in economic benefits,” she said, presenting data from a United Nations General Assembly report in 2025.
Non-communicable diseases (NCDs), such as heart disease and cancer, are an example of how investing in health can reduce the costs of climate change. “Climate change is actually one of the biggest drivers of [NCDs],” Kerry said, citing the WHO and World Bank’s $24 billion funding gap. “We keep forgetting that it costs us more to react to emergencies, any emergency in NCD [or] internal health, than it does to be upfront and pay for the prevention.”
A path forward
At the end of the talk, Kerry circled back to the driving question behind her speech: What can we do as a society to combat the issues we face today?
“We fail to understand the power of health [across] all of our society,” she said. Investing in health is the first essential step to addressing many current problems — economic growth, household security, and business productivity will all benefit from making health a financial priority.
If this happens, “you get the fundamental fabric of stabilization that actually allows for a more peaceful society,” Kerry said.