Health Care Without Harm was founded on the basis of environmental health and justice. Every person deserves the right to live in a healthy environment.
We have spent decades innovating, piloting, and implementing health care systems change efforts and partnerships in the health care sector to activate all of its assets – economic, political, moral, and clinical – in service of environmental health and justice.
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Our objectives
Mitigation
Transform the health sector to mitigate the climate crisis and its impacts on human health and accelerate the broader transition to a clean energy economy.
Resilience
Ensure health systems are resilient to climate impacts and actively supporting community climate resilience as anchor institutions.
Equity
Lead the health sector in reducing social disparities intersecting with climate mitigation and resilience, and amplify the voices of the most impacted communities.
Our goals
Health Care Without Harm's powerful network, built over the last three decades, is working to transform the health sector — ensuring it can balance the immediate needs for mitigation, resilience, and equity made bare by the climate crisis, while serving as a leader in the broader shift to a just, low-carbon economy.
Our ambitious strategic plan sharpens our focus and charts a course to transform the health sector in this pivotal time to better deliver on its core promise to "first, do no harm."
As part of this broader goal, we are working with our health care partners throughout the United States to accomplish the following goals:
▪ Reduce their greenhouse gas emissions
▪ Build climate resilience in their facilities and communities
▪ Build deep, place-based demonstrations of climate health and equity
Our strategies
Lead advocacy and shape critical policy
We leverage demonstrated successes and compelling campaigns to push for public policy changes and then use these changes to accelerate tangible impact on the ground.
Expand and mobilize our powerful global network
We strengthen our network's role as advocates for climate-smart health care to build climate mitigation and resilience into their operations and throughout the communities they serve.
Transform supply chains and procurement practices
We mitigate the health care sector's adverse impact on climate, environment, and health by transforming procurement practices and supply chains and advancing a circular economy.
Deepen place-based partnerships between health care and communities
We will facilitate partnerships among community-based organizations and health systems to build replicable models for collaborative action that advances climate mitigation, resilience, and equity.