Resources for organizations committed to climate action

Tools, guides, and webinars for hospitals, health centers, rural health clinics, suppliers, insurers, and group purchasing organizations committed to resilience and sustainability.

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Supporting your commitment

As a health care organization, you’ve committed to reducing your environmental impact and improving your emergency preparedness and resilience to better sustain your community’s health. Health Care Without Harm is here to support you in every phase of your journey with guides, tools, and webinars.

We're here to assist any organization – including hospitals, health centers, rural health clinics, suppliers, insurers, and group purchasing organizations – that has made a meaningful commitment to resilience and sustainability. Such a commitment typically includes:

  • Developing and releasing a climate resilience plan
  • Setting measurable goals to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, aiming for global warming limits of 1.5°C
  • Quantifying emissions across all three scopes
  • Reducing Scope 1 and 2 emissions by 50% by 2030
  • Sharing emissions reduction progress publicly

Commitments like the White House/HHS Health Sector Climate Pledge, as well as initiatives such as UNFCCC’s Race to Zero and Race to Resilience, meet these requirements.

We’ve selected resources to help you along the way:

Emissions reduction

Resilience planning

Want to start or expand discussions with your executives?

* These resources include a form to confirm your organization’s commitment(s) to emissions reduction and resilience. Practice Greenhealth partners can access the resources directly by logging in.

Ways to deepen your work

  • Join the leading sustainable health care organization, Practice Greenhealth, delivering environmental solutions to more than 1,600 hospitals and health systems in the U.S. and Canada. Practice Greenhealth offers practical, cost-effective solutions to hospitals, health systems, community health organizations, NGOs, nonprofits, government agencies, academic institutions, and more. For partnership details, email join@practicegreenhealth.org. Suppliers can visit the Industry Partner Opportunities page.
  • Join the National Academy of Medicine Initiative to Accelerate the National Climate and Health Movement. Help accelerate the national climate and health movement. This initiative mobilizes health organizations at any stage of their sustainability journey, offering free membership, guidance, resources, and networking opportunities.
  • Mobilize with America Is All In. Join a nationwide coalition working to address the climate crisis and secure a healthy, prosperous, equitable, and sustainable future. The coalition which includes cities, states, tribal nations, businesses, schools, and institutions of faith, health, and culture, aims to cut U.S. emissions by 50% by 2030 and reach net-zero emissions by 2050 while building resilience in the face of increasing climate impacts.

Setting effective goals for decarbonization and resilience: A cyclical framework

Whether you're starting your journey toward climate-smart health care or building on existing efforts, setting clear, measurable goals is essential. Committing to emissions reduction and resilience not only drives meaningful change, but strengthens connections across your organization. Goals help to define success metrics and ensure clarity for patients, staff, and the community about your organization’s sustainability priorities.

Keep in mind, the journey is not linear, but cyclical. To help guide you, we've broken it down into actionable phases:

  • Plan: Benchmark current performance and impact, then identify opportunities to set goals and priorities for creating an internal accountability structure to reduce emissions and build resilience.
  • Do: Implement changes, record data, and document any challenges you encounter.
  • Study: Analyse the data and evaluate the results of your actions, identify lessons learned and opportunities for improvement, and refine your action plan accordingly.
  • Act: Scale and institutionalize changes within your organization, share learnings with your peers, and take a leadership role in addressing climate change and improving health equity within your community.