Climate Crisis: The Health Service must take Responsibility

Anand and Sofie are both members of the project Decarbonising Healthcare (‘Grønt Helsevesen’).

There is an urgent need to reduce carbon emissions to avoid catastrophic climate change and an urgent need to reduce carbon emissions to avoid catastrophic climate change, according to the recently released International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report.

This Editorial outlines some of the different actions the healthcare service itself can take to avoid the potential health crisis from climate change becoming a reality. The Norwegian health sector represents 4.3% of Norway’s carbon emissions and the authors argue that politicians and decision makers need to start taking the necessary measures to ensure the health sector becomes carbon neutral.

Grønt Helsevesen is a project funded by the Centre for Climate and Energy Transformation (CET) to map out existing climate interventions across the health sector and develop a strategy for how the Norwegian healthcare sector can become climate neutral. Their report will be launched in the autumn. Grønt Helsevesen is a project involving BCEPS researchers Emily McLean, Anand Bhopal, Sara Soraya Eriksen, and University of Bergen medical students Sofie Haugan Shrivastava and Leo Larsen.