Oral health at COP31: the Global Oral Health & Climate Action Conference and the WHO Health Pavilion

Why dentistry is on a climate conference agenda

Health has had its own pavilion at the UN climate conferences since COP26, and oral health joined the programme through the Global Oral Health & Climate Action Conference series run by the University of Pennsylvania School of Dental Medicine. The argument is simple: dental disease is one of the most common conditions on the planet, dental care has a measurable footprint (travel, single-use materials, energy, water), and climate change hits oral health through heat, displacement and disrupted services. COP31 in Antalya hosts the fifth edition of that conference, which makes the host city a natural place to talk about what a climate-smart dental practice looks like.

The 5th Global Oral Health & Climate Action Conference (GOHCA-5)

GOHCA-5 is organised by Penn Dental Medicine's Center for Integrative Global Oral Health, coordinated by Dr. Julian Fisher, with Prof. Dr. Mutlu Özcan of the University of Zurich as co-organiser and country liaison. The local host and co-organising institution is Antalya Bilim University, whose Faculty of Dentistry, led by Dean Prof. Behram Tuncel, runs the Antalya programme.

The launch event is on Friday 6 November 2026 in Antalya, and the core scientific programme starts on Monday 9 November with an in-country launch live from the main COP31 venue. Over the following ten days the organisers plan more than 45 sessions with over 160 international experts, policymakers, researchers and industry leaders: scientific sessions, policy roundtables, industry–academic panels, innovation showcases and workshops. The World Health Organization, the FDI World Dental Federation and the International Association for Dental, Oral and Craniofacial Research are expected at the launch.

The conference has three stated objectives: engage national oral health communities in National Adaptation Plans and climate financing, raise awareness of the oral health consequences of climate change, and develop recommendations framed by the four pillars of the Model of Sustainable and Resilient Dentistry. Registration and attendance details are published by Penn Dental Medicine; the organisers had not stated at the time of writing whether sessions will be streamed.

The WHO Health Pavilion in the Blue Zone

The World Health Organization, with Wellcome and the wider health community, runs a Health Pavilion inside the Blue Zone for the full conference, 9–20 November, with a day dedicated to the Alliance for Transformative Action on Climate and Health (ATACH) on 10 November. Its purpose is to keep health and equity at the centre of the negotiations, and every pavilion event is live-streamed on the WHO events page, which is the easiest way to follow it without Blue Zone accreditation. Oral health is not a named theme of the pavilion; the dental agenda sits with GOHCA-5.

What "climate-smart dentistry" means in practice

The sustainable-dentistry literature keeps coming back to a handful of levers, most of which also make care better for the patient:

• Prevention first: a tooth that never needs a crown has no footprint. Check-ups, cleaning and early treatment of small cavities carry the lowest cost of all.
• Fewer journeys: patient travel is the largest share of dental care's emissions in most studies. Planning treatment so that it is completed in as few visits as possible matters more than any material choice.
• Digital workflows: digital radiography and digital impressions replace film, developing chemicals, plaster models and courier shipping.
• Doing laboratory work on site: when crowns and veneers are made in the same building, impressions and casts are not shipped back and forth, and remakes are rarer because the dentist and the technician can look at the case together.
• Less single-use: reusable instruments where sterilisation allows, and leaner packaging from suppliers.

How this looks at Tantalya

Two of those levers are built into the way the clinic works: all radiography is digital, including 3D imaging for implant planning, and the dental laboratory is on site, so crowns, veneers and bridges are designed and made in the building where the patient is treated. Treatment for visiting patients is planned to fit the shortest sensible number of visits, which for a COP31 delegate usually means stabilising a problem in one appointment and finishing when they are next in Antalya.

Dental professionals attending GOHCA-5 who would like to see how a clinic with its own laboratory handles a conference-week caseload are welcome to write to us; we are in Konyaaltı, on the west side of the city.