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National policies to accelerate climate action in US healthcare

Nature Climate Change volume 14, pages 889–891 (2024)Cite this article

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US healthcare contributes 8.5% of national greenhouse gas emissions, but its policies to guide mitigation and waste reduction are underdeveloped. We recommend national policies to streamline the adoption of best practices, address implementation challenges to achieve net-zero goals and serve as useful exemplars for other nations.

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Acknowledgements

H.S. is partially funded by the Houston Veterans Administration (VA) Health Services Research and Development (HSR&D) Center for Innovations in Quality, Effectiveness and Safety (CIN13–413), the VA National Center for Patient Safety, and the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (R01HS028595 and R18HS029347). The views expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the position or policy of their funders, members of the Action Collaborative on Decarbonizing the U.S. Healthcare Sector or the Action Collaborative as a whole, the National Academy of Medicine, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, the Veterans Affairs Healthcare System or the US government.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Medicine, Cooper University Health Care and Cooper Medical School of Rowan University, Camden, NJ, USA

    Elizabeth Cerceo

  2. Center for Innovations in Quality, Effectiveness and Safety, Michael E. DeBakey Veterans Affairs Medical Center and Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, TX, USA

    Hardeep Singh

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  1. Elizabeth Cerceo
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  2. Hardeep Singh
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Correspondence to Hardeep Singh.

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Competing interests

H.S. is a member of the National Academy of Medicine Action Collaborative on Decarbonizing the U.S. Healthcare Sector. E.C. declares no competing interests.

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Cerceo, E., Singh, H. National policies to accelerate climate action in US healthcare. Nat. Clim. Chang. 14, 889–891 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-024-02105-z

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