[Check against delivery]

Excellencies, colleagues,

It is great to be here at this important conversation.

Around the world, climate change is taking a huge toll on human health, from the impact of extreme weather events and natural disasters to heat stress, air pollution and the increase of infectious and vector borne diseases.

According to estimates by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, between 3.3 to 3.6 billion people globally live in contexts that are highly vulnerable to climate change.

To adapt to a changing climate - and protect people - our health systems must become more resilient. And at the same time, our health systems need to reduce their own emissions.

At UNOPS we support our partners in doing both - by offering practical solutions. We implement projects on behalf of our partners - across the UN system, governments, IFIs, and many others. We work closely with UN agencies mandated in health and humanitarian action, and we implement health projects and programmes in some of the most difficult operating environments around the world. In fact, health projects constitute our largest sector, and a third of our total delivery since 2016.

Allow me to share some examples of our work across Africa.

In Ethiopia, we are working with the Italian Agency for Development Cooperation to support the government in improving health services in the country's climate-vulnerable southern regions. UNOPS works to rehabilitate health centres, and supports enhanced access to water and sanitation infrastructure, focusing on sustainable solutions.

In Zimbabwe, following Cyclone Idai in 2019, UNOPS implemented a unique partnership between the World Bank and the UN to address the early and medium-term resilient disaster recovery needs of communities affected. This involved rebuilding infrastructure, restoring agriculture, and revitalizing healthcare, among other things.

In rural Sierra Leone, working with the government, private sector, the United Kingdom, Japan, the World Bank and others, we have helped provide a reliable, renewable source of energy for health facilities, businesses and households across the country, improving essential services for over 500,000 people.

Around the world, close to 1 billion people in low- and lower-middle-income countries are estimated to rely on health-care facilities without reliable electricity access or with no electricity access at all. In Sub-Saharan Africa, at least 25,000 health care facilities have no electricity, and more than 68,000 have only intermittent access.

At UNOPS, we work hard to support clean energy, to help accelerate universal health coverage. Here, we build on our experience on large scale solar electrification projects including in Ethiopia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Gaza, Haiti, Somalia and Yemen, and our hosting partnership with Sustainable Energy for All.

Strong partnerships - including those represented here today - are crucial to successful delivery, not only for the initial installation and commissioning, but for long term service delivery. The involvement of the public sector is crucial.

Across all of this work, the need for agile funding mechanisms is clear. Accessible, quality and predictable climate finance, along with innovative financial instruments, are fundamental to creating resilient health systems.

To ensure effectiveness, it is vital that health and climate commitments are established independently and go beyond political cycles. It is also crucial that climate and health-related initiatives move away from the current fragmented landscape and put vulnerable people at the centre of our work. Coordination is key: for example, between health and energy ministries to ensure healthcare to be explicitly considered as part of energy planning.

Moving forward, there is much progress to build on - but so much more to do. UNOPS co-hosts the NDC Partnership, along with World Resources Institute and UNFCCC. The partnership brings together more than 200 members to deliver on climate action. We can see increasing country partners are mainstreaming health considerations into climate policies, with health included in 91 per cent of country Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs). Nearly a third of NDCs now allocate climate finance to health action plans.

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Mr President, investing in health pays.

It will not only mitigate human suffering but will also reduce the economic burden of climate impacts.

So it makes sense to make health a cross cutting priority area in negotiations on financing, adaptation and loss and damage.

Building resilient health systems is key if we are to deliver on the promise of leaving no one behind. UNOPS is committed to these efforts.