World Health Organization

The World Health Organization (WHO) is the directing and coordinating authority for health within the United Nations system. It is the WHO's responsibility to produce guidelines and standards and help countries address health issues. The organization employs around 8,000 staff. These include doctors, epidemiologists, scientists, managers, administrators and other professionals from all over the world.

The organization has its headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland, and has offices in 147 countries organized around six regional offices and is to a large extent reliant on voluntary financial contribution from UN member states.

The WHO provides assistance and aid to nations with health crisis and leads negotiations to establish international health regulations to fight spreading and outbreak of disease.  In doing this the WHO provides leadership, supports research and generation and transition of knowledge, publishes reports and promotes and monitors implementation of solutions and provides technical support.

Since climate change is directly linked to present and future human health risks, the WHO has developed a special programme to address the issue. WHO directly links climate change to stratospheric ozone depletion, desertification and land degradation, freshwater decline and loss of biodiversity and ecosystem function which are problems that are apt to have a huge impact on human health.

The WHO programme ‘Climate Change and Human Health' builds partnerships with local WHO offices, academic institutions (such as Harvard Medical School), International Agencies (among these the IPCC and the UNFCCC) and National Agencies (such as the US Environmental Protection Agency). The WHO is developing a global strategy that outlines the overarching framework for the international response to protect health from climate change.