Excellencies, ladies and gentlemen,

Thank you for joining us for today's symposium. Our theme could not be more timely, or more compelling.

Let me start by saying that it is, as ever, a delight to join my counterparts Dr Tedros and Daren, and to recognize the excellent working relationship among our three organizations.  Our longstanding collaboration is testament to our shared resolve to work together to contribute solutions to the challenges confronting people worldwide.

That is why this year we chose to address the complex nexus between climate change and public health. 

The facts are sobering.  Climate change is already impacting global health.  Intense heat itself exacts a devastating toll on people, which will only worsen in coming years. In addition, rising temperatures mean carriers of infectious diseases are expanding in geographic scope, creating new threats.  We have already seen cases of local transmission here in Europe of Dengue fever, a supposedly ‘tropical disease’. Changing weather patterns are affecting food production across the globe  and threatening access to safe drinking water. Unchecked climate change is forecast to cause 250,000 excess deaths per year between 2030 and 2050, from undernutrition, malaria, diarrhoea and heat stress alone according to the WHO.

Health infrastructure in much of the world is already under pressure, as we saw during the COVID-19 pandemic. Extreme weather events, climate-driven migration and other shocks are adding to the burden, even as debt distress and slowing economic growth are constraining the ability of governments to invest in their health systems.

Interconnected risks to human wellbeing and sustainability demand interconnected responses.

Our three organizations must make full use of the policy tools we have in a coordinated, pragmatic way to help achieve the goals we share.  Our trilateral cooperation reflects the complementarities in our organizations' names and mandates: ‘Trade’ and ‘intellectual property’ are means to achieving the end that is ‘health’.

As our changing climate alters the spread of infectious diseases and spawns new pathogens, we will need to respond with both innovation and equitable access.  During the pandemic, we saw incredible innovation.  But we also saw deeply disturbing inequities in global access. 

Unless we start acting now, communities that were consigned to the back of the queue for access to COVID-19 countermeasures, just as they had been for HIV/AIDS drugs a generation earlier, could end up facing new health burdens without the infrastructure and resources to do so.

The economic and social impacts of climate change are inherently unequal. The countries that did least to cause the problem are among the hardest hit by its consequences, and the international community is still far behind on providing poor countries with adequate support for climate financing and loss and damage. It is not difficult to see how climate-related health impacts could end further compounding and entrenching these inequities. There is, therefore, every reason to map out both the scale and range of the full set of policy challenges to start to think through what integrated policy responses might look like.

As the COVID-19 experience taught us, one thing that public health and the climate response have in common is that stand-alone, atomistic national policy responses are futile. Climate action is only effective if it is collective, and failing to address health crises in some countries can ultimately present a threat to all countries. Cooperation is therefore the best way for nations to pursue their individual self-interest.

Trade policy has critical roles to play here.  Trade is a vital tool for disseminating green technology and driving down the cost of decarbonization, just as it was an indispensable force for scaling up the production and distribution of medical supplies, including vaccines, during the pandemic. At our Twelfth Ministerial Conference last year, members turned recognition of the latter into a concrete instrument, when they agreed on a declaration on pandemic response. In it,  they pledged to keep supply chains operating, and to exercise restraint in the use of trade restrictions on products important to life and health.

As you all know, at the WTO we have also been grappling with sensitive issues around intellectual property and technology transfer. To solve problems in public health and the climate, breakthrough technologies must be incentivized, invented, developed, and widely diffused. Innovation and access must go together. That is why the IP system was designed with ideas of balance and of public interest at its core. Governments have legitimate scope to intervene when necessary to protect the public interest, a key principle that was helpfully clarified in a consensus decision at MC12. The private sector can proactively form new partnerships and find new ways of licensing technologies, and we saw some welcome progress in this regard during the pandemic. There were also exciting initiatives such as the mRNA hub in South Africa, building on the work of existing organizations like the Medicines Patent Pool.

Debate on the IP dimension continues in different ways in all three of our organisations. This debate is important, if at times contentious.  What will ultimately count most,  however, is national governments' capacity and willingness to deploy the available tools with maximum agency and effect.  We can craft an exquisite toolkit here in Geneva, but real world outcomes for enhanced and equitable access depend on how governments deploy it at home.  This is why we have reaffirmed our commitment with the WHO and WIPO to step up support for developing countries to analyse their options to use TRIPS flexibilities and to put in place effective mechanisms in their domestic laws, and to complement  their use with enhanced procurement programs.  Let me emphasize that many developing country governments have not yet put in place the legal mechanisms or tools that allow use of existing or future flexibilities. With the impact of climate change on health becoming more evident, this is the time to get ready. I strongly  encourage member governments to make use of the technical assistance platform that has been set up for the purpose of strengthening domestic capabilities, and sit down with us to map out their requirements, so that future health crises can be tackled with confidence and clarity.

The pandemic response offers further lessons to guide our efforts to build climate-resilient health systems and support equitable access to medical technologies needed for climate adaptation.  While knee-jerk protectionism was perhaps an understandable response to the crisis, barriers to the operation of supply chains backfired and impeded sustainable health outcomes. Keeping supply chains for medical supplies open and running smoothly was a critical element of global equity in the immediate term and resilience in the longer term.  We saw the importance of working across policy domains: it didn't matter if you had money to buy vaccines if trade restrictions meant the doses couldn't get to you, or couldn't be manufactured at all. And we were reminded that delivering results for people demands action at the community, national, regional and international levels.

These understandings should inform global efforts to strategize for the health impacts of the climate crisis.

For our three organizations, this program of trilateral cooperation will help us pool resources and combine expertise to offer evidence, analysis, and insights about holistic responses. I hope it will continue to provide an example for how collaboration across different policy domains can work. At the operational level, I encourage developing country governments to work with our three organizations to implement this coordinated approach to innovation, access and procurement strategies for ongoing and future health challenges.

My goal for today's symposium is that we will come away with a clearer set of understandings about the nature of the challenges ahead, but also a reinforced resolve to work together to start delivering the responses we will need.

We at the WTO are certainly keen to get to work.

Thank you.