Around the world, record-breaking heatwaves, flash floods, hurricanes, wildfires and other extreme weather events have become more frequent and destructive, causing catastrophic harm to public health and local healthcare delivery. Across the US, Canada, Brazil, Spain, Greece, Libya, Pakistan, China — and many more countries — hundreds of hospitals have been destroyed or shut down, and many thousands of hospital patients forced to evacuate their hospital beds from fossil fueled weather extremes.
This is also a fundamental issue of health justice. The impacts of fossil fuels are suffered disproportionately by vulnerable communities across the global South – those least responsible for global fossil fuel emissions – and by healthcare systems in marginalized regions with the fewest resources to mitigate and recover: 300 hospitals were destroyed in Mozambique and Malawi in 2023 due to Hurricane Freddy – one of the most destructive tropical storms ever.
1 in 12 hospitals worldwide are at risk of total or partial shutdown from extreme weather events without a rapid phase out of fossil fuels.
Even on strictly economic terms, climate change adds tremendous burdens to local hospitals: One private US health system alone (HCA) suffered a $300 million loss in operating revenue from Hurricane Helene in 2024; the full costs to the US healthcare system from climate-change and fossil fuel pollution are estimated at $800 billion per year.
Climate change damages the healthcare grid, diminishing the health sector’s capacity to deliver basic patient care: The US suffered a national IV fluid shortage in both 2024 and 2017 when Hurricanes Maria and Helene destroyed major medical supply factories in Puerto Rico and North Carolina. Studies predict that without a rapid phase-out of fossil fuels, climate change will threaten the national blood supply chain.
This, in addition to the wide range of severe health impacts from exposure to toxic fossil fuel pollution: cancers, cardiovascular disease, respiratory emergencies, neurodevelopment disorders, maternal complications, and more (see Health Library). Children across the global South are particularly vulnerable: 1 in 3 children in Delhi currently develop asthma due to fossil fuel PM2 exposure.
The World Health Organization calls climate change “the greatest global health threat facing the world.” Indeed – extreme heatwaves now kill hundreds of thousands of people every year; Harvard researchers found that approximately 1 in 5 preventable deaths worldwide is attributed to to fossil fuel air pollution.
It’s why the the American Medical Association, the British Medical Association, the Canadian Medical Association and the National Academy of Medicine have all committed to fossil fuel divestment. It’s why hundreds of healthcare organizations have endorsed a proposed international fossil fuel non-proliferation treaty.
Yet – major healthcare systems across the United States actively contradict the global movement to phase out fossil fuels and continue to invest $Billions directly in the largest fossil fuel producers on Earth.
We note the US health sector’s high-profile ‘decarbonization‘ efforts, which have focused exclusively on day-to-day clinical operations – nurses turning off computers at night, recycling surgical supplies, changing anesthesia gasses, introducing “Meatless Mondays” etc. while ignoring the sector’s concurrent, massive investments into root-cause fossil fuels on the front end. We consider this a major ‘greenwashing’ by the sector’s leadership, with profoundly detrimental consequences to global health.
It’s like a doctor providing chemotherapy for a patient -while giving them cigarettes.
Fossil fuel investments enable massive new fossil fuel expansion, providing the finance necessary for oil producers to develop huge infrastructure – pipelines, Arctic drilling, deep-sea platforms, LNG terminals – locking in additional GHG emissions into the future – a direct contraindication to the 2021 “Call to Action” for health sector decarbonization issued by Dr. Victor Dzau, the President of the National Academy of Medicine.
There is ample precedent for fossil fuel divestment: Healthcare institutions divested from tobacco in decades past. And, today, 1600 global institutions from all economic sectors have fossil fuel divestment commitments.
This is the era of climate change – and it’s time healthcare divest from fossil fuels.
