Healthcare sits in a unique position. It’s on the front line of treating the effects of climate change and plastic pollution, and, at the same time, a contributor to both.
The Global Green and Healthy Hospitals (GGHH) network of Health Care Without Harm was created to address this very paradox. Drawing on 15 years of collective experience, action, and impact, GGHH is launching a new, focused roadmap to take healthcare further, together.
Climate resilience and plastics reduction, understood fully
Climate resilience is often limited to adaptation, getting ready for what's coming and catching up with what’s already here. GGHH+ takes a broader view: resilience means preparing healthcare systems to withstand and adapt to climate impacts, while also reducing the emissions they create.
Plastic is deeply woven into healthcare delivery, from devices and packaging to everyday single-use items such as gowns and drapes. Reducing it doesn't mean eliminating it overnight — it means building a path toward safer, reusable alternatives, reducing hazardous additives, and reconsidering what's truly necessary.
Together, these priorities strengthen services, protect patients, staff, and communities, and keep care running when conditions get difficult, while also improving efficiency and reducing costs.
Four action areas, one roadmap
To make both priorities actionable, GGHH+ organizes its roadmap around four strategic action areas:
- Infrastructure: designing and retrofitting facilities to withstand extreme weather, while reducing dependence on fossil fuels and avoidable plastic materials.
- Natural resources: using water, energy, and materials more efficiently, and shifting toward renewables, to reduce both environmental impact and vulnerability to shortages.
- Procurement: favoring lower-emission, lower-waste suppliers and products, and using healthcare's purchasing power to influence the broader market.
- Waste: preventing waste at the source, improving segregation and treatment, and shifting away from single-use materials wherever possible.
Every hospital and health system has a starting point that looks different — shaped by resources, geography, and local regulation. These two priorities and four areas give each institution a concrete place to begin, and room to expand their work and commitment over time.
Transformation in action
Whatever priorities and areas your institution chooses, the journey towards action follows the same stages, supported throughout by practical tools, resources, and a community of practice.
- Assess and target starts with an honest look at where your institution stands today, setting goals that double as opportunities.
- Plan turns those targets into a workable path forward, with peer insight along the way.
- Execute turns plans into daily practice. And when obstacles arise, the GGHH+ community is there, offering insight drawn from experience, not theory.
Monitor, adjust, and elevate keeps the work moving — reviewing what’s working, adjusting course, and taking on new action areas as capacity grows.
Running through all four stages is reporting: showcasing progress, inspiring others across the network, and earning recognition through global awards.
No single institution gets there alone. That's the premise of GGHH+.
Commit and transform together:
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