The Government Actuary's Department has used a recent ILC UK webinar to frame climate change as a health systems issue rather than a stand-alone environmental concern. In a government news notice, GAD said Georgina Bedenham, the department's Head of Climate and Disaster Risk, outlined how systems thinking can help officials examine the links between climate change, population ageing and health. The session, titled "Unpicking the web: climate change and health", was co-hosted by ILC UK, the ILC Global Alliance Climate Change Committee and GAD. It brought together actuarial, academic and international perspectives on how climate pressures can alter health outcomes and the services older people depend on.
GAD's starting point is that climate hazards affect health in more than one way. The government notice points to direct harms such as injuries and mental health effects after flooding and storms, alongside heat-related illness and dehydration during periods of extreme heat. It also points to indirect pressure. Healthcare delivery can be disrupted when infrastructure is under strain, while wider climate damage to economic growth can limit the budgets available for care. For policymakers, that distinction matters because the largest pressures may arise not from a single event, but from knock-on effects across several parts of the system.
Bedenham described climate change as a compounding risk. That language is important because it suggests that existing weaknesses in health, social and economic systems can be worsened by climate shocks, with consequences that build over time rather than ending when a storm or heatwave passes. For an ageing population, the concern is practical as well as analytical. Older people are more likely to rely on health and support services, so any interruption to transport, local care, hospital capacity or household resilience can carry through into poorer outcomes. The webinar's focus was therefore not only on hazards themselves, but on how institutions respond to them.
According to the government statement, GAD has been drawing on evidence and stakeholder engagement to co-develop a systems map linking climate-related hazards and mortality in the UK. The purpose of that work is to make interconnections visible, showing where a weather event, economic pressure and service disruption may combine to increase risk. In policy terms, a map of that kind can help departments test where intervention is most useful. It can show whether resilience spending is better directed at prevention, emergency response, service continuity or support for groups facing higher exposure. It also gives officials a common structure for discussing risks that cut across departmental lines.
The wider panel reinforced that these are not UK-only questions. Professor Liat Ayalon, from the School of Social Work in Israel, presented a case study from Togo that examined the effect of climate change on food security, social cohesion and migration among older people. Professor Torsten Kleinow, from the University of Amsterdam's Research Centre for Longevity Risk, discussed heatwaves and short-term mortality spikes across Europe. The panel discussion also drew on perspectives from South Africa, Bangladesh and Europe. Taken together, those contributions underscored two points set out by the organisers: climate-health pressures are global, and their effects vary sharply by population, place and institutional capacity.
GAD said the webinar offered an opportunity to share emerging findings from its project and to set out future plans. The department's stated aim is to deepen understanding of the interaction between climate change and health so that actuarial analysis can better support public decision-making under conditions of uncertainty. That matters beyond actuarial practice. If climate risk is treated as a cross-system issue, the policy response cannot sit only within environmental planning. Health services, local resilience arrangements, social care, infrastructure planning and fiscal assessment all need to work from the same understanding of where pressures may arise and who is most affected.
The government notice does not present a final model or a new formal forecast. Instead, it signals a method: bringing evidence, stakeholder input and systems mapping together before risks are translated into policy choices. That is a measured approach for a field where single-cause explanations are often too narrow. A recording of the event has been published on the ILC UK webinar page. For officials and practitioners, the immediate value lies in how the discussion turns broad climate risk into questions that departments can test against service delivery, mortality trends and long-term planning for an ageing society.