This introductory chapter makes the case for moving beyond the concept of Health in all Policies and towards a Health for all Policies approach. Health for All Policies is a framework emphasising co-benefits: the ways in which improved health or better health systems and policies can attain other goals. In terms of the SDGs, it captures the extent to which better health status, and use of health budgets, policies, and infrastructures, can contribute to all of the SDGs, whether fairly obvious ones (health enables education) to ones that require more thought (health care systems’ procurement and waste disposal systems affect life under the seas). The case for co-benefits is not just that it shows what health policy can do for other goals. It is not just that it shows what health policy should do for other goals such as sustainability or reducing gender and other inequalities. It also opens up new perspectives on coalitions, politics, and governance.

Climate change will continually increase natural disasters, particularly hurricanes and wildfires (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2021; Shukla et al., 2019). Major disasters cause acute health impacts, notably from injury during flood-events (Blake & Zelinsky, 2017), and direct damage from smoke and particulate matter inhalation in the case of wildfires (Bowman & Johnston, 2005). Natural disasters also amplify infectious disease risk while simultaneously disrupting access to health services (Sharma et al., 2008; Willison & Holmes, 2020).

Achieving co-benefits places the focus on politics and governance. This chapter presents two basic frameworks for identifying opportunities to make successful policy for co-benefits. One is for addressing the problem of change within government, in the framework commonly used by advocates of intersectoral policy. We adopt a framework that can clearly identify key dynamics and opportunities for the construction of cross-cutting policies, as well as the areas in which, under current circumstances, progress is likely to be limited and advocates might find themselves frustrated or defending their achievements against attack. The second approach to analyzing politics and the possibility of action is grounded in the analysis of agenda-setting, which has been profitably applied to the area of intersectoral policy for health. In both cases, these are basic analytic frameworks for understanding which action is likely to be effective, in order to improve the likelihood that proposals for achieving co-benefits do achieve their potential benefits.

The logic of co-benefits produces many theoretically interesting ideas, but to become convincing, it must be paired with competent policy analysis and evaluation. This chapter focuses on the many examples of co-benefits in practice and research literature in order to demonstrate that many policies have effects, intended or unintended, beyond their main targets.

This finally introductory chapter emphasises the goal of the book: Rather than reinvent the idea of HiAP, we propose that it simply needs to be expanded. Instead of just offering the one-directional relationship that HiAP proposes (other sectors è health), an expansion of thought is required to make this offer two-dimensional. Health for all policies posits that other sectors help the health sector, and that the health sector helps other sectors. This new relationship highlights what health can do for other sectors while simultaneously attaining co-benefits for its own sector.