ANTALYA/GENEVA, 9 November 2026 – Unitaid today announced a US$10.9 million investment to help protect essential medicines, diagnostics and other health products from rising temperatures and humidity, addressing an overlooked challenge in preparing health systems for climate change.
Health products are tested and approved for use under specific temperature and humidity conditions. Yet those conditions can be difficult to maintain throughout global supply chains, particularly in settings with limited infrastructure. Climate change threatens to make extreme exposures more frequent and severe, while major gaps remain in understanding which products are most at risk and what action is needed.
The initiative, a consortium led by the United States Pharmacopeia (USP), will investigate which essential health products are vulnerable to heat and humidity today, which could become vulnerable as temperatures rise over the next 20–30 years, and what can be done to protect them.
The Safeguarding Heat Stability in Essential Life-Saving Drugs and Diagnostics project – known as SHIELD – will run from 2027 to 2030 and examine selected products relevant to HIV, tuberculosis, malaria, and maternal and child health.
“A medicine or diagnostic test may spend weeks in a shipping container baking in the sun, travel along hot roads and sit in a clinic without reliable cooling before it reaches a patient. We need to know it will still work when it gets there,” said Unitaid’s head of climate Vincent Bretin. “This is an often-overlooked part of preparing health systems for climate change. We cannot afford to wait until lifesaving medicines and tests reach the communities that need them most, only to find that heat and humidity have compromised the treatments people rely on or the results that guide their care.”
Researchers will measure the temperature and humidity products encounter during storage, transport and delivery in India, Kenya, Nigeria and Senegal, with findings validated in Brazil and South Africa to test their transferability to other settings. Laboratory testing will then assess how selected products respond to these conditions, while climate projections will help anticipate how risks could evolve over the coming decades.
The findings will help shape the solutions, policies and practices that guide how health products are developed and delivered in a warming world. Depending on the evidence, these could include better packaging, temperature monitoring, changes to storage and distribution, or improvements to the products themselves, alongside updates to global guidance and regulatory practice on how products are tested, approved, and procured. The project will prioritize solutions led by the Global South and support promising approaches that could attract further investment.
“Climate and weather events are increasingly affecting global supply chains and the potential impacts on the quality of medicines and diagnostics at the last mile are not fully understood,” said Emily Kaine, MD, Senior Vice President of Global Health at USP. “We are proud to partner with Unitaid on the SHIELD project which will, for the first time, provide essential data to help develop and deploy more climate-resilient strategies that preserve and extend access to quality essential health products, particularly in climate-vulnerable communities.”
Alongside USP, the consortium includes ACCESS Health International, VillageReach and Wits University Planetary Health Research, as well as technical partners Ecovamed, and the Brazilian National Institute for Space Research (INPE). Governments, regulators, health workers and communities will contribute across all six countries, with community and frontline health-worker perspectives helping shape the research and solutions considered to ensure they reflect conditions where products are used.
The project will also develop guidance to help countries incorporate product heat resilience into health adaptation planning and inform future decisions on procurement, regulation and investment.
Announced on Health Day at COP31 – the United Nations Climate Change Conference – SHIELD reflects Unitaid’s commitment to ensuring that advances in access to essential health products are not undermined by the growing impacts of climate change.
About Unitaid
Unitaid saves lives by making new health products affordable and available in low- and middle-income countries. Collaborating with partners, Unitaid identifies innovative treatments, tackles market barriers, and quickly delivers solutions to those in need. Since 2006, Unitaid has unlocked over 100 health products, addressing HIV, TB, malaria, women’s and children’s health, and pandemic preparedness. Every year, these products benefit more than 300 million people. Unitaid is a hosted partnership of the World Health Organization. www.unitaid.org
About USP
USP is a private, non‑profit scientific organization that collaborates with stakeholders around the world to develop public quality standards and solutions that support quality across the development, manufacturing, and delivery of regulated health products; strengthen regulatory systems; enhance supply reliability; and support the adoption of innovation. Used in more than 150 countries, USP standards and solutions play a critical role in increasing the availability of quality medicines, dietary supplements, and food ingredients worldwide.
Kyle Wilkinson
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