The health sector's climate leaders
The Health Care Climate Council is a leadership body of U.S.-based health systems committed to protecting their patients and employees from the health impacts of climate change and becoming anchors for resilient communities. As a group of diverse health systems from across the country committed to addressing climate change, the Climate Council uses its unified voice to set and track climate goals, share best practices with one another and the broader sector, and collectively advocate for policies that accelerate progress toward achieving climate-smart health care.
Health Care Climate Council members are leading-edge health systems driving the transformation to climate-smart health care through a three-pillar strategy:
- Mitigation: reducing the carbon footprint of health care delivery and using the leverage of supply chains to drive market transformation to a low-carbon economy.
- Resilience: preparing for the impacts of climate change by building resilient hospitals that serve as anchors for healthy, sustainable communities.
- Leadership: acting as critical messengers for communicating the health impacts of climate change and advocating for climate-smart policies at all levels of government.
The membership criteria for the Health Care Climate Council includes a commitment to integrating equity and justice values in the organization’s climate work and includes:
- Mitigation: establishing a baseline greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions inventory and setting and publicly releasing a goal to be net zero by 2050 with an interim milestone to reduce emissions 50% by 2030.
- Resilience: incorporating climate risks into emergency preparedness planning and developing a climate resilience plan for continuous operations, including soliciting input and addressing the needs of community groups that experience disproportionate risk.
- Leadership: establishing leadership support, advocating publicly, and implementing employee engagement programs for climate action.
Health Care Climate Council by the numbers
The Health Care Climate Council membership includes 19 leading health systems representing over 550 hospitals and 9,500 health centers in 45 states, with more than 1.2 million employees serving over 77 million patients annually
All Health Care Climate Council members are also members of Health Care Without Harm’s membership organization, Practice Greenhealth. Founded in 2008, Practice Greenhealth is the leading membership and networking organization for sustainable health care, delivering environmental solutions to more than 1,700 U.S. hospitals and health systems. This learning community sets and tracks environmental goals and shares best practices to accelerate the collective progress toward climate-smart health care.
Climate Council members
- Ascension
- Advent Health
- Advocate Health
- Boston Medical Center
- CommonSpirit Health
- Hackensack Meridian Health
- HealthPartners
- Kaiser Permanente
- Mass General Brigham
- Northern Light Health
- Northwell Health
- NYU Langone Health
- Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center
- Providence
- Rochester Regional Health
- Seattle Children's Hospital
- Stanford Health Care
- University of California Health
- University of Vermont Medical Center
Climate Action: A playbook for hospitals
The Climate Action Playbook captures examples of the many ways Health Care Climate Council members are moving toward climate-smart health care. It is intended to inspire hospitals to engage further in climate action, and provide a vivid path forward to achieving measurable progress and outcomes.
Incentivizing supply chain decarbonization
The Climate Excellence Standard for Health Sector Suppliers defines superior performance in decarbonization for manufacturers and distributors. The standard was established by the Climate Council as part of its aim to reduce GHG emissions within health care supply chains. Twenty of the largest medtech suppliers to the health systems that comprise the council provided valuable input through surveys, interviews, and roundtables to the standard.
Climate Council Advocacy
- Health Care Climate Council Letter Supporting the CMS TEAM Decarbonization and Resilience Initiative (June 2024)
- Health Care Climate Council Policy Recommendations (October 2023)
- Health Care Climate Council Letter Supporting the EPA's Proposal to Limit Carbon Pollution from Power Plants (August 2023)
- Health Care Climate Council Requests CMS Waiver to use Inflation Reduction Act Funds for Renewable Microgrids (January 2023)
- Health Care Climate Council Supports Climate Provisions in Build Back Better Package (January 2022)
- Support for US Commitment to COP26 Health Programme (September 2021)
- Health Care Climate Council Infrastructure Recommendations Letter (May 2021)
- U.S. Call to Action on Climate and Health 🡥 (2019)
Hope for a healthy planet
The Health Care Climate Council’s founding statement on climate change and health proclaims climate change to be one of the greatest threats to human health today. The declaration affirms the commitment of each member of the council “to reducing global greenhouse gas emissions in order to protect and promote public health,” and calls on hospitals nationwide "to join us in taking significant and measurable actions that the mitigation of climate change demands."
For more information about the Health Care Climate Council, contact Emily Mediate, U.S. director of Climate and Health for Health Care Without Harm and Practice Greenhealth.