Climate justice in healthcare
As climate change worsens, healthcare organizations are positioning themselves as leaders in resilience, sustainability, and preparedness in their communication strategies. Across the United States, hospitals and health systems are releasing climate action plans, sustainability reports, and environmental health strategies to show they are ready for climate change. Unfortunately these communications don't actually get to the bottom of environmental health inequities and are generally focused on managing risk for their own organizations.
Climate change is a health equity issue
Climate change is an environmental crisis and a public health crisis. Extreme heat, wildfire smoke, flooding, food insecurity, and poor air quality hit hardest in communities that have long faced structural inequality. Redlined neighborhoods are a perfect example of this—to this day, these communities face heat and environmental burdens due to decades of unfair housing and planning policies.
Let's be clear, these inequities are result of more than a century of structural racism, unequal investment in infrastructure, segregation, and economic policies that determine who is protected and who is left at risk. Still, even with these inequities laid bare, healthcare communications often describe climate impacts as separate “hazards” that need preparedness instead of showing them as results of long-standing systemic issues.
Preparedness and resilience are only the beginning
Health systems need emergency plans, climate-ready buildings, and ways to keep running during crises, but the problem is stopping there. Preparedness and resilience matter, but focusing on just institutional resilience can take the politics out of the issue if it ignores the deeper causes of climate vulnerability.
In many U.S. healthcare climate plans, climate-related harm is treated as an external risk. Organizations generally focus on readiness, governance, and continuity planning, but often don't mention the policies that created unequal environmental exposure in the first place. Instead of focusing on prevention and holding systems accountable, these messages may unintentionally put the burden on communities to just “adapt” to worsening health and environmental conditions .
Listen to your community
Communities most affected by environmental harm should be seen as experts in defining problems and solutions for them. Many institutional climate messages mention 'partnerships' or 'community collaboration,' but few specify whether affected communities actually have decision-making power to drive meaningful change.
Public-sector and international organizations, such as the World Health Organization and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, are generally more likely to include equity and cross-sector collaboration in their messaging. However, even these actions are usually guided by experts instead of being fully participatory.
On the other hand, many U.S. healthcare systems are more focused on keeping operations running and on governance. While some organizations acknowledge unequal impacts, few clearly connect those harms to segregation, housing policy, labor conditions, or regulatory decisions.
When thinking about community collaboration, organizations need to ask the following questions:
Are residents helping shape risk assessments?
Do they influence policy priorities?
Are their lived experiences used as evidence?
Supporting meaningful action
Healthcare communication should do more than inform people about the climate threats and impacts they may face; it should also help communities push for accountability through comprehensive reform and sustainability. So, how do we find practical ways for organizations to improve? Below is a checklist for healthcare organizations to check whether their communications truly support justice-focused climate action:
Explicitly names structural drivers such as redlining, zoning decisions, and unequal infrastructure investment.
Distinguishes symbolic “engagement” from real power-sharing with communities.
Ensures community knowledge shapes evidence, priorities, and solutions.
Clearly identifies accountable actors, timelines, and enforcement mechanisms in their community.
Connects environmental health literacy to collective action and policy advocacy and doesn't place the burden on an individual.
Why This Matters for Healthcare Communicators
Today, healthcare systems are on the frontline and respond to climate-related illness, but they also contribute to environmental harm through their own operations and supply chains. Because of this unique place in their community's climate conversations, their communication strategies carry important ethical and political weight for the communities they serve.
If climate communication focuses just on resilience and readiness to respond to a disaster, institutions risk sending the message to their stakeholders that climate vulnerability is simply unavoidable or not political. But when a health system communicates strategically and address structural inequities and supports prevention, they can help reframe climate change as a collective justice issue, not just a tactical problem. True leadership is facing the systems that decide who is most harmed in the first place and supporting communities into developing sustainable change.