Climate change and climate disasters directly affect the health and wellbeing of individuals, communities, and environments in a myriad of ways. Inclusive and community-led health projects can help build local capacity to anticipate, plan for, and respond to climate shocks, strengthening the resilience and adaptive abilities of the healthcare system and its workers.
Integrating health into climate planning and policy through cross-sectoral engagement reduces risk by addressing upstream social and environmental determinants of health, like housing, water security and food systems.
Collaborative research that integrates data, methods, and perspectives across fields is essential to uncover these linkages, identify vulnerable populations, and design effective interventions that strengthen health systems, inform policy, and build resilience in communities facing the growing health risks of a changing climate.
We aim to:
Explore the wide range of climate impacts on health, from heat stress to climate anxiety, using justice-based and multidisciplinary approaches.
Investigate health inequities driven by climate change, focusing on vulnerable populations and the social determinants of health such as housing, food security, and access to care.
Develop and evaluate community-led interventions that strengthen health system resilience to climate shocks, including extreme heat events, vector-borne diseases, and infrastructure stress.
Work with Australia’s neighbours to ensure research meets the needs of communities and partners across the region, and addresses their adaptation and resilience needs.
Current clinical decisions are almost exclusively made based on medical outcomes, with some cursory considerations to health economics and value-based care calculations. Carbon and environmental costs in health are not yet considered routinely, but in future will likely become more of a focus in decision making.
This project will investigate the carbon footprint of two comparable cardiac procedures with identical or very similar clinical outcomes but different clinical pathways. The study will compare the carbon cost of coronary bypass surgery with that of coronary stent insertion.
This comparison will provide additional information for clinicians and patients when considering the best treatment options for them. It will also be relevant to Health Systems planning.
Contributors: Professor David Celermajer, Dr Chris Kocx, Lorraine Ho, Professor Danielle Celermajer, Kirsten Jackson, Dr Fabian Sack, Professor Arunima Malik, Dr Amanda Irwin, Raymond Van Der Zalm, Dr Kristen Pickles, Dr Scott McAlister, Jake Williams, Philomena Colagiuri.
This project seeks to design a carbon footprint calculator for medical procedures.
The calculator will be designed using NSW Health cost data and environmentally extended input-output analysis.
The work will serve to inform public health policy so that it aligns with the nationally determined contribution to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 43% below 2005 levels by 2030.
This proof-of-concept project will build on Sydney Environment Institute research that analyses the carbon costs of common cardiovascular procedures.
This project is supported by SEI’s 2024 Collaborative Grants Scheme.
Contributors: Dr Fabian Sack
Australia’s health system contributes 7% of the country’s total emissions. Anaesthesia is a carbon hotspot, with volatile anaesthetic gases alone accounting for 2% of the entire health system’s footprint. Nitrous oxide (N2O, “laughing gas”) is an inhalational anaesthesia and potent greenhouse gas still in common use in hospitals in Australia. There is currently no data available on the use of N2O in maternity wards from an economic perspective, so it is impossible for clinicians and policymakers to know the full impact of N2O.
This cross-disciplinary project will measure clinician’s use of N2O in maternity units in Australia, and identify challenges and opportunities for switching to low-carbon alternatives. In close collaboration with SEI and newly-appointed NSW Health Net Zero Leads, this project will combine expertise in behavioural science, qualitative methods, and lifecycle assessment to contribute to a research agenda of global environmental interest: transitioning healthcare to a net-zero future.
This project is supported by SEI’s 2023 Collaborative Grants Scheme.
Contributors: Professor Arunima Malik, Dr Kristen Pickles
Header Image: Emergency medicine doctors marching in Nipaluna-Hobart in 2019 by Amy Coopes
