We are evaluating the effectiveness and implementation of the Wellcome Trust’s Climate Impact Awards, a scheme aimed at making visible the impact of climate change on physical and mental health.
Wellcome’s Climate and Health programme aims to enhance understanding of how climate change affects human health and to identify effective interventions and policies to address the climate crisis while protecting and improving health.
The Climate and Health team’s Climate Impact Awards funding scheme, launched in 2023, aims to highlight the effects of climate change on physical and mental health to drive urgent climate policy action. It funds global transdisciplinary teams to deliver short-term, high-impact projects that combine evidence generation, policy, stakeholder engagement, and communication.
Our role
Itad’s evaluation will assess the commissioning and implementation of the grants, and the impact of the scheme and portfolio as a whole. We will also facilitate evidence-based learning with the Wellcome team to enable them to strengthen the awards and maximise their effectiveness.
Our aim is to inform ongoing learning by the Wellcome Trust in order to improve the targeting of the commissioning process and the impact potential of the selected grants.
Our methods and approaches
We will deliver a theory-based evaluation through three modules:
- The process module will assess how and to what extent the current Climate Impacts Awards process is working to achieve the intended outcomes of the scheme.
- The impact module will assess the level of impact the funded teams have been able to achieve in their work so far, and will identify ways in which Wellcome could continue to track that impact. Findings from the process module will be integrated here to help explain how evidenced progress towards impacts was achieved.
- The learning module will capture evidence from the process and impact modules, and will facilitate Wellcome – and other stakeholders as relevant – to engage with associated insights to co-create findings and recommendations that can inform iterations and adaptations to the Climate Impacts Awards.
Outcomes and impact
Itad will work closely with Wellcome team to enable them to strengthen the awards and maximise their effectiveness, ultimately to contribute to a strengthened global ecosystem on health and climate research and policy, and enhanced climate policy action to address adverse health impacts.
