Building a Climate-Smart Healthcare System for California
Climate change remains a serious threat to human health, and healthcare organizations in California, across the U.S., and globally can be catalysts in creating a climate-smart future.
Acknowledgments
The Bay Area Council Economic Institute would like to thank its partners and co-authors on this project, Health Care Without Harm and the California Clean Energy Fund.
Patrick Kallerman, Research Director at the Bay Area Council Economic Institute and Jessica Wolff, MBA, MSN, U.S. Director of Climate and Health at Health Care Without Harm co-authored this report. Robert Knop, intern at the Economic Institute, Eric Lerner, former Climate Director at Health Care Without Harm, and Ben Bartlett, former Director of Strategic Partnerships at the California Clean Energy Fund also made significant contributions to the report.
The authors would like to thank the following individuals for thevaluable insight and expertise they shared during
the drafting process:
• Ramé Hemstreet, Travis English, Seth Baruch, Hilary Costa, Kathy Gerwig — Kaiser Permanente
• Sister Mary Ellen Leciejewski, Rachelle Wenger, David Jones — Dignity Health
• Gail Lee, Christopher McCracken — UC Health
• Andy Wunder, Kirsten James — Ceres
• Paul Lipke, Robin Guenther, Julie Moyle, Beth Eckl, Lucia Sayre, Courtney Crenshaw, Stacia Clinton, Janet Howard, Hermine Levey Weston — Health Care Without Harm and Practice Greenhealth
This report was made possible in part with support from the Kresge Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, and the Wallace Global Fund.
The chart above demonstrates the total contribution the healthcare sector could make in the race to meet California’s goals. To help sector leaders and policymakers with their efforts to combat climate change, this report examines why the healthcare sector must act, what the extent of the sectors emissions are, and how investing in climate-smart strategies can provide health and often financial benefits. The report showcases some of the major steps that California hospitals have already taken to redesign their facilities and implement practices to address climate change. It then concludes with a list of recommendations for concerted private and public-sector action.
In order for hospitals to make the dramatic changes needed to build a climate-smart healthcare system, state policies and regulations must support climate-smart healthcare strategies. Even in California, a national leader in environmental policy, there are policies and regulations that limit the healthcare sector’s ability to act. Policymakers and regulatory bodies need to understand how healthcare’s needs and regulations uniquely impact their ability to implement climatesmart interventions, and healthcare executives need to advocate for the integration of healthcare into climate and energy policy and climate considerations into health policy. With the right the healthcare sector can become a considerable positive force to help the state meet and exceed its climate goals, direct billions of dollars into the low carbon economy, and serve as a model to be replicated in other states and subnational entities around the world.
To help sector leaders and policymakers with their efforts to combat climate change, the analysis in this report makes the case to invest in climatesmart health systems and details ways to achieve that goal.