The climate crisis threatens to exacerbate numerous climate-sensitive health risks, including heatwave mortality, malnutrition from reduced crop yields, water- and vector-borne infectious diseases, and respiratory illness from smog, ozone, allergenic pollen, and wildfires. Recent reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change stress the urgent need for action to mitigate climate change, underscoring the need for more scientific assessment of the benefits of climate action for health and wellbeing. Project Drawdown has analyzed more than 80 solutions to address climate change, building on existing technologies and practices, that could be scaled to collectively limit warming to between 1.5° and 2 °C above preindustrial levels. The solutions span nine major sectors and are aggregated into three groups: reducing the sources of emissions, maintaining and enhancing carbon sinks, and addressing social inequities. Here we present an overview of how climate solutions in these three areas can benefit human health through improved air quality, increased physical activity, healthier diets, reduced risk of infectious disease, and improved sexual and reproductive health, and universal education. We find that the health benefits of a low-carbon society are more substantial and more numerous than previously realized and should be central to policies addressing climate change. Much of the existing literature focuses on health effects in high-income countries, however, and more research is needed on health and equity implications of climate solutions, especially in the Global South. We conclude that adding the myriad health benefits across multiple climate change solutions can likely add impetus to move climate policies faster and further.

There is a clean energy transition underway in the United States (US). Since 2015, about a dozen states and the District of Columbia (DC) and Puerto Rico have set targets requiring that all their electricity production come from clean or carbon-free sources, in many cases by between 2040 and 2050, and other states have set similar non-binding goals (Paulos et al., 2021). Such ambitious clean energy proposals are most common in the electric power sector, but others focus on transportation. In 2020, California set a goal through executive action requiring that all new passenger vehicles sold by 2035 be zero-emission (California Executive Order N-79-20, 2020). Some pledges are even starting to extend to the whole of the economy. Governors in California, Louisiana, and Michigan have issued executive orders calling for economy-wide carbon neutrality, and in 2021 Massachusetts became the first state to pass legislation aimed at reaching net-zero GHG emissions statewide (Paulos et al., 2021). There is also renewed interest in climate and clean energy policy at the federal level. The Biden administration has called for 100% carbon-free electricity nationwide by 2035, a 50%-52% reduction from 2005 levels in economy-wide GHG emissions by 2030, and net-zero emissions economy-wide by no later than 2050 (The White House, 2021). Despite these promising goals, the current pace of decarbonization in the US is still incompatible with a world in which global warming is limited to 1.5°C or 2°C above preindustrial levels, the targets set in the Paris Agreement