The Biden Administration’s Opportunity to Lead on Healthy Places

Just over a month in and IWBI is encouraged by the Biden administration’s early actions and whole-of-government approach to defeat the COVID-19 pandemic.

Already President Biden has issued several notable executive actions and continues to make quick progress on advancing his $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan through Congress, which just passed in the Senate before it heads back to the U.S. House of Representatives. But given the urgency of this moment, we are also working to advance critically needed strategies, beyond legislation, that can help put the nation on a safe, healthy and equitable path to recovery.

Here are three key areas where the administration should continue to take action to help better position our buildings, businesses and communities as vehicles to support prevention and preparedness, resilience and recovery in response to COVID-19 and other public health challenges:

• Advance an equitable recovery through healthier buildings and communities
  COVID-19 has laid bare long entrenched health inequities while having tragic and disproportionate impacts on vulnerable populations. Our solutions should prioritize those communities that we know need them most. We have an opportunity to drive enduring change that better supports a just recovery, particularly in how we address high-priority building sectors such as affordable housing, senior and assisted living, healthcare facilities, hospitals and schools.
• Tackling climate change as a public health crisis
  Winning on climate is winning on health. With the increasingly devastating impacts of a changing climate, we are seeing how important it is to move more aggressively on planetary health. But our solutions should be equally aggressive on addressing human health. By doing more to align health, energy efficiency and climate strategies, the administration can help accelerate America’s transition to a clean energy economy while also addressing major public health challenges, including the crisis we’re in now.
• Support investing for health
  For the past year, IWBI has worked collaboratively with stakeholders around the world to better understand how human health affects corporate performance indicators like productivity, engagement and resilience. The investment community has increasingly advanced environmental, social and governance (ESG) criteria into their analyses, and human health factors continue to gain recognition as material to a business’ bottom line. In alignment with the Biden administration’s goals, IWBI is helping bridge the gap by uniting investors, companies and capital market leaders to highlight how investing for health has the potential to be a key competitive advantage for organizations in the United States and abroad.

The opportunity to realize a safe, healthy and equitable recovery means taking meaningful action today. We stand ready as a resource and will continue to do our part to activate policy solutions that support people first places that deliver on the critical role buildings, organizations and communities play in advancing health and well-being.