Climate change has accelerated more rapidly than most scientists predicted, swiftly bringing us to the precipice of a cascading crisis from which there may be no return. If we keep burning fossil fuels and pumping out greenhouse gases the way we do today, related health crises will escalate. We could see more than nine million additional climate-related deaths each year by the end of the century—and that estimate may be conservative.

Despite such massive health implications, the health sector—its powerful ethical voice, its economic power, and its political sway at every level of government—has been mostly absent from the climate debate since world leaders signed the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in Rio de Janeiro more than 30 years ago.

Yet recently the health sector has entered the fray. Today we are witnessing the early stages of a massive movement toward health-care climate action—a burgeoning wave that the organization I work with, Health Care Without Harm (HCWH), has helped build. HCWH is an international NGO that has worked since 1996 to reduce the health-care sector’s environmental footprint and mobilize it as an advocate for environmental health and justice. One of the triggers of the recent shift we helped precipitate was our finding in 2019 that if health care were a country, it would be the fifth-largest greenhouse gas emitter on the planet. This surprising news provided motivation. If the health sector is, paradoxically, a contributor to climate-related health problems, it can also be part of the solution. With this insight, we saw an opportunity for systemic change.

In what follows, I explore how this movement began to unfold, how it scaled, and where it is headed as it joins the global cross-sector fight for a healthy climate. I examine how consciousness and engagement evolved rapidly in the health-care sector and, by extension, how it might evolve in other sectors and on other issues. I also grapple with the challenges and shortcomings that the health sector faces in taking on such an existential crisis. Finally, I attempt to draw lessons from the experience that can support further health-care climate action, as well as transformational change in other sectors of society.

The climate crisis is a full-blown, rapidly evolving global health crisis that threatens to make the COVID-19 pandemic pale in comparison. The savage storms, heat waves, floods, and drought that characterize climate change have already had major impacts on human health. Heat stress exacerbates cardiopulmonary disease and death while also increasing adverse pregnancy and birth outcomes. Climate-related forest fires pollute the air across continents, causing respiratory illness and multiple other maladies. Health infrastructure has been destroyed all around the world because of extreme weather events, undermining the delivery of care. Climate anxiety and other related mental health challenges are growing. Warming temperatures are also bringing vector-borne diseases, such as malaria, Lyme, and chikungunya, to areas where they have previously not existed or have long been absent, putting millions of people at risk.

Read the full article about why the climate crisis is a health crisis by Josh Karliner at Stanford Social Innovation Review.