Planetary Health. How the healthcare sector is on board with tackling climate change – Morgen:Rapport
January 14, 2025
Climate change and health - Healthcare and climate change: the connections are far more diverse than they often seem.
It is generally known that increasing heat in summer and more extreme weather events throughout the year also entail increased health risks for us. Less attention has so far been paid to the fact that the healthcare sector in a country like Switzerland is itself responsible for around 5-8% of CO2 emissions and thus contributes significantly to further warming and to exacerbating the health consequences of climate change.
In the anniversary episode of Morgen:Rapport, we speak to Christian Abshagen, Head of Sustainability at the University Hospital Basel and Co-President of the Swiss Consortium for Sustainable Health and Ecological Transformation of the Healthcare System (ETHICH) - after one year, we are now already at 20 conversations with movers and shakers:from the various branches of our healthcare system - on the question of how awareness of the links between climate and health can be raised and how all stakeholders can be won over to the necessary transformation of the healthcare system. And we learn why, according to Christian Abshagen, it is good news if nurses and doctors also take a more activist approach to a sustainable healthcare system. The discussion entitled "Planetary Health. How the healthcare sector is on board with climate change" was conducted by Jean-Daniel Strub, ethicist at Gesundheitswelt Zollikerberg.
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