A panel discussion takes place at The Globe and Mail with moderator and health columnist André Picard, left, Dr. Owen Dan Luo, Dr.
Courtney Howard and William Gagnon.Jenna Muirhead/The Globe and Mail
Canada’s health care system must cut its greenhouse gas emissions and reduce its carbon footprint for the sake of the health of all Canadians. That was the urgent call to action at the Health and Climate Change conference, which was held at The Globe and Mail in Toronto on Oct. 6, the country’s first National Day of Action on Planetary Health.
Kim Perrott, executive director of the Canadian Health Association for Sustainability and Equity (CHASE), pointed out that while Canada’s biggest greenhouse gas emitters are the oil and gas, transportation and electricity sectors, the health care industry accounts for about 5 per cent of the country’s emissions. That puts Canada among the highest per capita health care emitters globally.
“There’s something to be said for cleaning up your own house,” said Ms. Perrott during a session at the conference, which was co-hosted by the Canadian Medical Association, the Trottier Family Foundation and The Globe and Mail. “If you’re going to ask other sectors to clean up their house, it’s important that we do our part to [reduce] emissions from our health care facilities and our jobs.”
Climate change is increasing temperatures, causing drought, heat waves and forest fires, Ms. Perrott added. Those changes lead to higher health threats for Canadians, including premature deaths, respiratory issues, lung cancer, and food and water insecurity, with low-income and Indigenous communities hit hardest.
Reducing packaging and decarbonizing medicines
During another panel, sustainable health systems expert William Gagnon pointed out that upwards of 70 per cent of the emissions in the health care industry are from the supply chain, including pharmaceuticals, medical devices like inhalers and other products.
“[Doctors tell me], ‘I’m tired of opening packages,’ ” said Mr. Gagnon, who helps health care professionals decarbonize their practices. Single-use plastics are a big problem, he added. “Most of the emissions are actually happening from outside the hospital.”
An easy switch is to move to more reusable products, he said, as well as less carbon-intensive medicines. For example, a common anesthesia gas called Desflurane “has a super, super high global warming potential 2,500 times the impact of carbon dioxide,” Mr. Gagnon said. That’s the equivalent of driving a car hundreds of kilometres, but alternatives such as Sevoflurane and intravenous anesthesia have a much lower carbon footprint.
“The easy wins, the quick wins are decarbonizing anesthesia, so I think we are getting there slowly,” he said.
Already, Newfoundland and Labrador, Northwest Territories, Nunavut and areas of British Columbia and Nova Scotia have phased out the use of Desflurane, with Quebec and Ontario also working on making this change. The European Union is banning its use by Jan. 1, 2026.
Training medical students to think differently
Dr. Owen Dan Luo, an internal medicine resident physician at McGill University, talked about the importance of teaching medical students how to practice in a climate crisis. To that end, Dr. Luo co-founded Project Green Healthcare, where teams of medical students partner with local hospital systems to design and implement improvement projects that reduce their carbon footprint across the country.
Efforts like these are building “a whole generation of health care providers … to become lifelong health care sustainability champions,” he said.
He pointed to another program that’s just received funding, Environmental Action by Residents and Trainees for Health (EARTH), which helps medical residents look at a problem, figure out what the local needs are, take action and evaluate their success.
Collaboration between national and regional teams
The panel participants agreed that for these kinds of changes to be implemented at scale, health care system stakeholders from across the country need to come together to devise solutions.
But it can’t be just people volunteering their time to try and make meaningful change, said Dr. Courtney Howard, an emergency room physician in Yellowknife and chair of the Global Climate and Health Alliance. This problem requires a “national resource centre” of physicians, lawyers and accountants to deal with national policy and collaborate with similar regional teams.
“And then a [paid] green team at every hospital, where people actually have time to make the rounds, collect the data” and implement changes, she added.
Dr. Luo pointed out that physicians try to abide by the Hippocratic Oath as much as possible – to “do no harm.” But if health care professionals are not actively working to reduce the carbon footprint of the health care sector, “we are not filling our mandate,” he said.
“We may be treating a patient in front of us, but we are causing inadvertent harm to the populations that surround the health system and to the global system that we are citizens of, and I think we need to reconcile that.”