Pandemic recovery could be opportunity for greener health-care system, advocates say

As countries meet at COP26 to tackle the climate crisis, the health-care system should reduce its carbon emissions too, advocates say, and contribute to a greener society.

As delegates gather in Glasgow for the COP26 environmental summit, they’re not just looking at reducing emissions from the oil sector or manufacturing – they’re also examining how to make health care greener.

Now could be a good time to do it too – while governments also fix problems in health care highlighted by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, some say.

“These are all part of the same problem,” said Dr. Andrea MacNeill, a surgeon at Vancouver General Hospital and the medical director of planetary health for Vancouver Coastal Health. “Fixing one will help fix another, and that’s why this has to be part of a comprehensive post-pandemic recovery.”

Two commitments of the COP26 program deal directly with health care: creating “climate resilient” health systems that can cope with new challenges presented by climate change, and creating “sustainable low-carbon health systems” that produce fewer emissions themselves.

“We need to be making sure that from a do-no-harm perspective, our hospitals are contributing to a healthy future as opposed to a worse future,” said Dr. Courtney Howard, an emergency room physician in Yellowknife and past president of the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment.

According to a report published in 2018, Canada’s health-care sector accounts for just under five per cent of the country’s emissions – an amount that’s not “massive,” but still significant, says Fiona Miller, a professor of health policy and director of the Centre for Sustainable Health Systems at the University of Toronto.

“Every sector, no matter how big, small or indifferent, has to become part of this solution,” she said. “Nobody can really be exempted from this.”

As the health-care system grows, she said, its carbon footprint shouldn’t grow too.