Laura Kate Bender, Assistant Vice President, Nationwide Healthy Air, American Lung Association
Deb Brown, Chief Mission Officer, American Lung Association
Founded 120 years ago, the American Lung Association is the leading organization working to save lives by improving lung health and preventing lung disease through research, education, and advocacy. Central to our work is a mission imperative to champion clean air for all. We work tirelessly to protect public health from air pollution to ensure that all people have air that is safe and healthy to breathe, including through advocacy to address climate change and advance clean air policy at every level of government.
It used to be that climate change was primarily seen as an environmental issue, conjuring up images of polar bears on melting ice caps. To the general public, the effects of climate change often felt distant—both in terms of geography and how far into the future they would occur.
However, decades of hard work by the health and medical community—from public health, medical, nursing and other organizations to individual providers and other experts to grassroots activists passionate about the health of their communities—have helped connect the dots between climate and health. The narrative has begun to shift to the impact climate change is already causing, at home and at present. And unfortunately, more people have lived through a health-related impact of climate change themselves.
The connection is clear: climate change is a health emergency and making the health case to policymakers is critical to addressing it. Philanthropy has an important role to play in bolstering the health voice.
From the wildfire smoke that blanketed the East Coast in 2023 to the devastation in the Los Angeles this year, the nation’s consciousness is now well aware of what the West has long been experiencing: climate change is driving wildfires, and the resulting pollution is making people sick. Hurricanes and their bevy of safety and health-related impacts, extreme heat, the spread of vector-borne diseases like Lyme to new areas, and other current climate harms are helping people understand the impacts like never before.
For years, the health community has been increasing efforts in response to climate change across a wide range of topic areas, including, but not limited to:
- reducing the health care sector’s contributions to emissions, such as switching from fossil fuel to clean energy to power hospital operations, conserving electricity and reducing medical waste;
- preparing health care professionals and public health workers to treat the impacts they are seeing;
- educating patients about how to take steps to protect their own health, researching new connections and treatments; and
- changing curricula at medical schools to better reflect the realities of climate change (the health care sector is marshalling a response to the effects of climate change on patients and communities and working to prevent emissions from getting worse).
The American Lung Association is involved in many of these initiatives, either as a major organizational priority or as a partner of organizations who are leading the charge. For the last 15 years, we have also engaged in a deliberate campaign to elevate the voice of the health sector in advocacy for policy change.
In operation since 2010, the American Lung Association’s Healthy Air Campaign provides leadership of the health community in advocating for federal clean air and climate protections. With philanthropic support, we identify and track policies that will improve public health by cleaning up air pollution and addressing climate change, with health equity as our north star. We recruit, train, and mobilize physicians, nurses, and other health professionals as credible validators of the need for strong clean air and climate policies. And we coordinate a coalition of national health and medical organizations to engage in advocacy for those policies.
Central to our continued strategy is maintaining a health focus on our clean air and climate work. We partner with health and medical organizations using health-focused messaging. This helps us ensure that the public and policymakers see the strength of the health community and its expertise in supporting clean air and climate policies. It also helps ensure that our advocacy highlights health equity and environmental justice by putting health at the center of our policy priorities.
The health community fought for and celebrated major federal policy wins in recent years, from the investments in a cleaner future in the Inflation Reduction Act to multiple lifesaving rules from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to cleaning up emissions from a wide array of sources. Defending these wins, and laying the groundwork for future clean air protections, is an urgent priority. At the same time, using a similar playbook of empowering health professionals, health organizations, and individual advocates to work in coalition for policy progress at the state, regional, and local levels is urgent, too.
Philanthropy can help build capacity among health organizations at every level to advocate for these policies by funding dedicated staff capacity to organize coalition and track policy developments; invest in shared capacity (i.e. through contracted work) to develop media and materials across multiple organizations; and ensure the health sector is included as a key element of broader climate strategies in their grantmaking. Philanthropy had also directly aided in the expansion of Lung Association staff capacity through the hiring of dedicated new positions to address specific priority areas such as wildfire prevention, building electrification, and industrial decarbonization.
The Power of the Health Voice
Central to our theory of change is that the health voice is a powerful constituency in pushing policymakers to adopt measures to clean up air pollution, mitigate climate change and protect public health.
An annual Gallup “Honesty and Ethics” survey asks respondents to rate the honesty and ethical standards of people representing different occupational fields. Nurses, dentists, medical doctors, and pharmacists consistently rank toward the top of the list; in the 2023 survey results, all were rated to have high ethical standards by a majority of respondents. While the profession of “lobbyist” wasn’t included in the most recent survey, in 2021, this profession rated dead last, with just 5 percent of respondents saying they had a high degree of ethical standards and honesty.
As both a research tool and a policy advocacy tool, the Lung Association worked with a survey firm, Global Strategy Group, to poll voters on their support for air quality and climate change policies and these policies’ likely impacts on health. In March 2024, the poll found that voters overwhelmingly supported stricter national limits on particle pollution (soot) and on carbon pollution from power plants and thought that the new soot limits would have a positive impact on the health of families like theirs.
Poll Result: Voters Make the Connection Between Air Pollution Standards and Health

Previous polls from the Lung Association show that health voices were more credible to respondents than industry voices on clean air and climate topics.
Of course, the Lung Association is far from the only researcher on the power of the health voice in climate conversations. Separate from our Healthy Air Campaign work, EcoAmerica’s American Climate Perspectives Surveys and other research show the progress the nation has made in understanding that climate change is a health issue. Research from 2024 shows that 70 percent of Americans are aware that climate change can affect their health. It further showed that majorities of Americans across party lines are interested in learning about how to protect their health and trust health professionals at least somewhat to provide information about climate change.
Additionally, the Medical Society Consortium on Climate Change and Health, a coalition working at the national, state, and local levels, has issued numerous reports to unify the health community around the fact that climate change is a health emergency, but also a health opportunity if we collectively use the urgency of the crisis to transition to a clean future for electricity, buildings, food production, and transportation.
The Value of Working in A Coalition
A core focus of the Lung Association’s Healthy Air Campaign’s efforts has been to build a coalition of health and medical organizations advocating for federal climate action from a health perspective. At the onset of the Campaign, we decided to invite organizations representing the broader health community—from medical societies to public health groups to patient advocacy organizations and more—to engage at whatever level they were able. Rather than promoting an overarching brand for the coalition, we have emphasized the groups engaged on any given issue. This varies according to organizational interest and capacity on each issue; for example, organizations involved in cancer prevention have been particularly engaged on reducing particle pollution, as it is a known carcinogen. Over the past year alone, the Healthy Air Campaign’s coalition of organizations has weighed in in support of a wide range of federal rules to address climate change, from stopping methane leaks from gas pipelines to supporting appliance efficiency standards to cleaning up gas-fired power plants and much more.
The value of working in coalition among health and medical organizations is substantial. It allows groups to engage in advocacy opportunities, like signing on to comments to an agency or testifying at a hearing on a proposed rule, when they might not have had the dedicated capacity to otherwise track and draft feedback on a given issue. It allows the health community to showcase its breadth and depth of engagement.
It is also important to counter the polarization of climate change issues. In addition to advocating to the Environmental Protection Agency and other federal agencies, the Lung Association and our coalition partners also educate Congress about the need to further protect health from climate change, and—separate from foundation dollars—also lobbies on important clean air legislation. During one memorable Senate hearing, a committee member highlighted a letter from the Lung Association in opposition to a bill as evidence that it would harm public health and increase air pollution. Another senator questioned the letter’s credibility—and she responded by reading the names of the dozen other health organizations that signed on to the letter. She asked her colleague (paraphrased), “Are you really arguing that all these organizations aren’t credible when they’re saying that this law would be bad for people’s health?”
It is important for philanthropy to recognize that empowering health organizations with capacity to work on advocacy, particularly in coalition and coordination with other health organizations, has potential at every level of government—not just federal. Oftentimes, a new overarching structure or branded group effort is not necessary; rather, existing health organizations benefit from dedicated capacity to help coordinate among themselves for progress.
Federal Wins and State Opportunities
In 2025, continued federal advocacy on climate change by the health community will be critical. But state and local opportunities abound, too, across everything from renewable energy production to standards to get more zero-emissions vehicles on the road to policies to clean up buildings and manufacturing. State and local advocacy is also needed to ensure that the gains being made are not only beneficial for the climate but also advance environmental justice by cleaning up communities that have lived near polluting sources for too long.
Philanthropy plays a crucial role in this urgent work. Ensuring the health community has the capacity to coordinate and engage at every level will help build even more public and policymaker interest in getting clean air protections and climate measures across the finish line, advancing health for everyone.