Tools and resources

A guide for going carbon neutral

Kaiser Permanente recently became the first health system to achieve carbon neutral status in the country. As the largest integrated, nonprofit health system in the United States, this achievement demonstrates its longstanding commitment to sustainability. Certified by the CarbonNeutral Protocol, the organization has eliminated or offset its 800,000-ton annual carbon footprint, the equivalent of…

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Customizable RFP for Assessing Climate-Related Infrastructure Risks

• Climate and Health

Preparing for and investing in climate resilience can safeguard lives and an organization's financial viability. This customizable request for proposal (RFP) will help health care systems undertake infrastructure risk assessments and mitigation analyses for facilities facing extreme weather events and other climate risks. This template can help you identify and guide potential partners to explore…

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"Health care's collective purchasing power can shape the marketplace"

• Sustainable procurement
• Gary Cohen
• Purchasing
• Climate and Health

(Sustainable procurement guide) One of the greatest challenges we face today is embedding sustainability and justice into the things we buy. For generations, our march toward an increasingly globalized economy has come at the expense of our health, social justice, and the environment. For just as long, those costs have remained hidden, the harm externalized.  The COVID-19 crisis exposed the…

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Renewable electricity procurement

• Renewable Energy
• Sustainable procurement

Part of Impact purchasing commitment: Getting started guides  Hospitals are energy-intensive, using 2.5 times more energy per square foot than a typical office building. The burning of fossil fuels drives both air pollution and climate change, with outdoor air pollution killing over 4.5 million people each year globally. Renewable electricity can replace power from fossil fuels – improving…

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2018 sustainability data

Practice Greenhealth’s data, collected from hospitals across the country, will assist hospitals in identifying key sustainability program opportunities by benchmarking their own program’s performance. The data is divided into 10 components of health care environmental stewardship programs: leadership, waste, chemicals, greening the operating room, food, environmentally preferable purchasing,…

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2019 sustainability data

• Benchmark Report

Practice Greenhealth collected and compiled extensive sustainability data from 327 hospitals to provide timely information to hospitals and health systems working to build environmental stewardship into their mission. The environmental performance data coming out of health care continues to substantiate the claim that sustainability initiatives can add value, reduce negative health and…

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Health care's climate footprint

• Climate and Health

If the global health care sector were a country, it would be the fifth-largest greenhouse gas emitter on the planet, according to Health care’s climate footprint: How the health sector contributes to the global climate crisis and opportunities for action, a report by Health Care Without Harm in collaboration with Arup. The report provides the most comprehensive global analysis of health care’s…

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Executive summary

• Climate and Health
• Community Benefit
• Toolkit
• Executive Summary

(Delivering community benefit: Climate and health toolkit) This climate and health toolkit is designed to help environmental leads introduce a new framing of climate and health to their community benefit colleagues. It introduces tools and resources to help community benefit staff identify climate-related health risks in their communities, current projects that have climate co-benefits, and how…

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UC San Francisco: Tasty food that just happens to be plant-based

• Case Study
• Food

  “I don’t sell plant-based, I sell delicious looking and tasting food that just happens to be plant-based."  - Dan Henroid, University of California San Francisco Medical Center  The University of California San Francisco Medical Center is a signatory of the Cool Food Pledge, a new platform to help hospitals offer diners more of what they want while slashing food-related greenhouse gas…

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Climate co-benefits of healthy food access interventions

• Community Benefit and Wellness
• Food
• Tool

(Health Care Without Harm) This issue brief provides an introduction to bringing climate risks into the community health needs assessment process and identifying valuable climate co-benefits of new or existing food-related initiatives in the community benefit implementation strategy.  By aligning environmental stewardship activities at the hospital with community health activities, there is a…

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