While we think of carbon emissions coming from manufacturing and agriculture, we don’t often think of those arising from health care. In Australia, health care is responsible for 7% of national carbon emissions, while globally, health care is responsible for 4.4% of emissions.
If global health care was a country, it would be the world’s fifth largest emitter. The warming resulting from health-care’s emissions in turn cause harm to human health through heatwaves, wildfires, increased mosquito-borne infectious diseases, and undernutrition due to drought and lower fish stock.
