The human and health impacts of climate change are becoming increasingly hard to ignore. Extreme weather events are disrupting more and more lives and businesses while also exacerbating chronic health conditions like asthma, expanding the range of infectious diseases, and worsening mental illness. In 2018, the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimated that to avoid catastrophic changes to our climate, we need to cut our greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2030 and get to net zero emissions by 2050. It’s time for all of us to take the threat and opportunity of climate change seriously, but how can businesses make meaningful change? How does sustainability fit into the competing priorities so many of us face? We spoke with leaders at four major U.S. health systems — Cleveland Clinic, Kaiser Permanente, Boston Medical Center (BMC), and Partners Healthcare — that are finding solutions.
How Health Systems Are Meeting the Challenge of Climate Change
Climate changes strikes at the very core of health systems whose mission is to keep people healthy. They are also affected financially and structurally by the rising frequency of extreme weather events, and they are major contributors to carbon emissions. On all fronts, health care systems are on the front lines of climate change. We spoke with leaders at four major U.S. health systems — Cleveland Clinic, Kaiser Permanente, Boston Medical Center (BMC), and Partners Healthcare — that are tackling climate change by making their facilities carbon neutral between 2020 and 2027 while building climate resiliency, expanding their operations, tending to the bottom line, and providing excellent health care. Each of them are working in four arenas: they view climate change action as central to their missions, they are rethinking how they use power and where it comes from, they are building resilient structures when given an opportunity to rebuild, or adding resiliency features when working with existing buildings, and they are pursuing creative partnerships to pay for changes.
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