Getting to Net Zero: One Health System Fights Climate Change

01/28/22 • 24 min

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Climate change can have a devastating impact on our health. When people are injured or exposed to disease related to floods or fires, it’s up to health systems to pick up the pieces.

But health care itself is one of the world’s most carbon-intensive industries, responsible for 4.5 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions. What can health systems do to address climate change?

In the United Kingdom, the National Health Service (NHS) has set some ambitious goals to reduce its carbon footprint. On the latest episode of The Dose, Nick Watts, the NHS’s chief sustainability officer, talks about how the health service is meeting these goals, and whether its efforts could be replicated in countries like the United States. A low-carbon health care system, he says, is actually just a good health care system.

Climate change can have a devastating impact on our health. When people are injured or exposed to disease related to floods or fires, it’s up to health systems to pick up the pieces.

But health care itself is one of the world’s most carbon-intensive industries, responsible for 4.5 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions. What can health systems do to address climate change?

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Boosters, Omicron, and What’s Next in the Pandemic

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The Omicron variant is sweeping across the United States and the rest of the world, breaking previous records of COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations. While it may cause milder illness, its transmissibility and ability to evade vaccines make this surge particularly challenging to navigate.

On the latest episode of The Dose podcast, host Shanoor Seervai asks Alison Galvani, founding director of the Yale Center for Infectious Disease Modeling and Analysis, to bring listeners up to speed on this phase of the pandemic. Galvani and her colleagues have found that increasing the number of boosters administered each day could save thousands of lives.

Vaccination is relatively inexpensive, particularly compared with the costs associated with hospitalizations and productivity losses, even from mild cases, she says.

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Race Matters — Arriving at More Equitable Health Policy

Social programs like Medicaid are supposed to help people, but often they reproduce racial inequities — and sometimes actually create them. That’s because even well-intentioned policymakers can’t always see the disproportionate impact their decisions have on people of color.

But what if there were a tool to help legislators and government officials identify when and how they should be thinking about racism? Well, Jamila Michener has developed one. And on the latest episode of The Dose podcast, she explains how it can be applied to Medicaid’s transportation benefit specifically and to health policy more broadly.

Michener, an associate professor in Cornell University’s Department of Government, speaks about how her research on, and personal experiences with, Medicaid has highlighted the importance of hearing from people impacted by policy choices.

“You can't really address the ways that racism manifests... unless you have people who experience it directly at the table, not only having voice, but also having some power,” she says.