The harms to human health and to healthcare delivery from fossil fuels and climate change are already happening. The range and severity of harms are expected to worsen without a rapid phase out of fossil fuels.
Pediatric cancers, cardiovascular complications, respiratory disorders, heat-related emergencies, neurodevelopment toxicity, prenatal health – the specific health impacts directly linked to fossil fuel pollution and climate change is voluminous. Visit our Health Library for research links – or see From Cradle to Grave, an extensive summary of global health impacts of fossil fuels across the human lifespan, issued by the Global Climate and Health Alliance.
A remarkable link to early death: Harvard researchers found that approximately 1 in 5 preventable deaths worldwide is attributed to to fossil fuel air pollution, estimating hundreds of thousands of people every year now die from record heat extremes and exposure to toxic fossil fuel air pollution.
Children are particularly vulnerable to the toxins in fossil fuels:
1 in 3 children in Delhi develop asthma due to fossil fuel PM2 exposure.
Children in Pennsylvania who live near fracking production sites are 2 to 3 times more likely to be diagnosed with leukemia.
Fossil fuels threaten patient safety and diminish healthcare delivery: Hundreds of thousands of hospital patients across the world – from Alberta to Louisiana to Mozambique to Zhengzhou have been forced to evacuate hospital beds in recent years to escape deadly wildfires, massive flash floods, and other fossil fueled weather extremes. Rural hospitals in Florida, Louisiana and Tennessee were destroyed by fossil fueled monster storms between 2017 and 2025; 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. Healthcare systems in marginalized regions with limited resources suffer the worst: Over 300 hospitals were destroyed in rural Mozambique and Malawi in 2023 due to Hurricane Freddy – one of the most destructive tropical storms ever.
Burdens the health system grid: Climate change adds tremendous resource and economic burdens to the healthcare grid, diminishing the health sector’s capacity to deliver basic patient care, even in wealthy nations: Hospitals across the U.S. substituted Gatorade for normal IV fluids due to national IV fluid shortages in 2017 and 2024 when Hurricanes Maria and Helene destroyed major medical production facilities. Studies warn that without a rapid phase-out of fossil fuels, climate change will threaten the national blood supply chain,
One study estimated the costs to US healthcare from climate-change related impacts at over $800 billion per year.
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. Hundreds of healthcare organizations have endorsed a proposed international fossil fuel non-proliferation treaty.
Yet – individual major healthcare systems across the United States still invest $Billions directly in the largest fossil fuel producers on Earth. Our 2023 case study report “The Biggest Malpractice” details over $4 billion in financial investments in fossil fuels by just four major private US health systems: Kaiser Permanente, HCA Healthcare, Mayo Clinic, and Ascension Health. Public records show similar fossil fuel investments made by EVERY private health systems we studied. It’s a problem across the US health sector – these investments provide the finance used by oil producers to develop huge new fossil fuel infrastructure: international pipelines, remote Arctic drilling, massive deep-sea platforms and LNG terminals locking in additional GHG emissions and the associated universal harms to public health and healthcare delivery – well into the future.
These institutional investments in fossil fuels stand in stark contraction to the landmark 2021 publication in the New England Journal of Medicine: “A Call to Action” for health sector decarbonization issued by Dr. Victor Dzau, the President of the National Academy of Medicine.
There is ample precedent. As of early 2026, 1600 global institutions from all economic sectors have fossil fuel divestment commitments. The one sector glaringly missing from this list – sadly – is the US health sector.
It’s also an issue of fiduciary responsibility: several major public pension funds have reported financial loss by not divesting from fossil fuel holdings, and in early 2026 a major US employer was sued for violating its legal fiduciary responsibilities by ignoring climate-related financial risks in the pension and retirement funds it managed for their employees.
Healthcare professionals are increasingly demanding their own hard-earned retirement and pension funds not fund the same fossil fuels at the root of such extreme health harms and financial risk.
This is the era of climate change – and it’s time healthcare divest from fossil fuels.
