Depolitizing environmental harm in health systems
Healthcare institutions are beginning to recognize that environmental issues such as climate change, air pollution, extreme heat, and aging infrastructure pose real risks to public health. At the same time, Social Determinants of Health frameworks help healthcare organizations look beyond just medical factors to include social and financial influences on health. Still, many healthcare communications treat environmental harm as a technical problem to be managed rather than treating it as a deeper injustice rooted in inequality. Often, environmental racism is left out of these conversations.
My current research compares how health systems in the United States and other countries discuss environmental health risks with their main audiences, including patients, clinicians, and administrators. Rather than assuming healthcare organizations simply pass along information, this project sees them as key players whose communication shapes how people understand health, responsibility, and equity.
Healthcare organizations have a conflicting role within environmental justice discourse. Although they are generally regarded as trusted authorities on health and risk, they frequently present themselves as fringe participants in this area. Schwarze’s (2006) commentary on environmental crisis rhetoric shines through here: health systems in the United States have chosen to depoliticize environmental harm by portraying it as universal and unavoidable, whether intentional or not. Essentially, this widely accepted institutional stance has allowed health systems to recognize environmental harm while distancing themselves from its structural and political origins.
In the United States, healthcare communication is generally molded by a complex, market-based system. Environmental messages often appear in reports and materials that focus on changing an individual’s behavior and on adapting to risks. These messages usually leave out direct mentions of environmental racism, failed regulations, or economic exploitation, and instead treat environmental harm as something that just happens, not as a result of systemic inequalities. Furthermore, government and political communication in the United States that focus on environmental risk continue to perpetuate the idea that solutions can be implemented without addressing the longstanding impacts of environmental racism (Climate adaptation plan, 2024).
In contrast, governments and health institutions in countries such as the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, which have public or national healthcare, seem to view environmental risks as a shared issue linked to public health, disease prevention, and equity. Their different political and organizational structures affect how they communicate about responsibility and who is most at risk. This project will examine health systems as organizations that shape how people think about environmental issues within their broader political and economic contexts.
The central research question guiding this work is: How do healthcare institutions communicate environmental and climate-related health risks in ways that address health inequities shaped by social determinants of health and environmental racism? Drawing on environmental communication scholarship, this study examines whether institutional messaging frames environmental risk as individualized or structural, whether vulnerability is depicted as demographic inevitability or as a policy outcome, and whether environmental responsibility is attributed to individuals, institutions, or government systems.
This research is grounded in environmental justice, constitutive, and critical risk communication frameworks. Environmental justice communication emphasizes recognition, voice, and participation, highlighting the exclusion of underrepresented communities from dominant environmental narratives. Constitutive communication theory, as articulated by Cox (2010), illustrates how institutional discourse constructs meanings for health, risk, and care. Critical risk communication interrogates approaches that individualize responsibility and obscure power dynamics. Collectively, these frameworks enable a critical analysis of healthcare institutions as actors that shape environmental meaning and constrain political possibilities.
This project will employ a qualitative case study approach to compare organizations. It will examine public materials such as climate strategies, sustainability reports, health equity plans, and patient guides. The analysis will focus on the use of language, metaphors, and responsibility, as well as how different audiences are addressed in each country.
This project supports the goals of this course by applying environmental communication theory to real organizations, exploring moral challenges in sustainability and risk communication, and looking at how institutions shape what environmental issues mean. The final product will be a comparative case study that highlights patterns, gaps, and barriers in communication, offering insights for healthcare communicators seeking to connect environmental messages with health equity.
References
Cox, R. (2010). Environmental communication and the public sphere (2nd ed.). Sage.
Schwarze, S. (2006). Environmental crisis as a challenge to deliberative democracy. Environmental Communication, 1(1), 87–102.
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. (2024). Climate adaptation plan. https://www.sustainability.gov/pdfs/state-2024-cap.pdf
World Health Organization. (2024). Communicating on climate change and health: Toolkit for health professionals. World Health Organization.
World Health Organization. (n.d.). Operational framework for building climate-resilient health systems. World Health Organization.