Carbon accounting as tablestakes | 2/6/2024

Climate Health Innovators! Embark on a bi-weekly journey where we explore groundbreaking ideas, pivotal news, and exciting opportunities designed for anyone interested in championing climate action in healthcare. If you know someone who would benefit from CHILLing with us — clinicians, builders, or funders — tell them to subscribe here. 📬

Whitespace: Carbon accounting as tablestakes

Our $4.1 trillion healthcare sector (that’s 18.3% of our GDP) accounts for 8 to 10% of emissions in the U.S. We can have an outsized impact on the economy by using our healthcare sector’s purchasing power to drive national decarbonization — including the transition to clean energy and a low-carbon supply chain. At CHILL, we believe innovations in software and hardware can accelerate this transition.

In the next few newsletters, we’ll be covering whitespaces that we see for builders, makers and entrepreneurs to build new solutions for climate health. This week’s opportunity: How can we assist healthcare orgs in tracking and disclosing their GHG emissions?

To commit to science-based targets and track progress towards them, healthcare orgs need to be able to calculate their emissions across their organization. It’s not negotiable. States are starting to make it a requirement, like in California where large corporations will have to disclose their climate risks and impacts under two major climate disclosure laws signed by Governor Gavin Newsom last week.

Carbon accounting is the catalyst to a cascading of decarbonization strategies, and organizations are taking note, with more than 130 signing the Health Sector Climate Pledge launched by the White House and HHS, which includes commitments of reduce organizational emissions by at least 50% by 2030.

The global carbon accounting software market is worth $12.7 billion with verticalized incumbents staking their claim: Watershed serves tech companies (and just raised a $100M Series C), Persefoni has become the darling of financial firms, and CarbonCloud leads in the food sector. There are several tools specific to the healthcare industry including Practice Greenhealth Scope 3 GHG Emissions Accounting Tool. But we believe there’s still room for a modern, user-friendly solution that’s designed for the healthcare value chain, including Scope 3 emissions which are the largest and most difficult to quantify.

A case study: A health system we spoke with had the most sophisticated carbon accounting solution… in Excel. They spent 3+ years building it from scratch because “no off-the-shelf tools exist,” integrating datasets across their EHR and account payables, ​generating heatmaps and visualization, and surfacing recommended actions. If you added up all the hours and resources that internal team members put in, it’d be a $1 million+ project to create, let alone maintain. Imagine the savings and standardization from purchasing an off-the-shelf carbon accounting software, built for healthcare.

Other news

  • A panel of four early childhood health experts discussed the effect of climate change on childhood development at a Harvard Graduate School of Education forum. (Harvard Crimson)

  • The Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, the continent’s chief health advisory body, has tied the worst outbreak of cholera in three years to climate change. (TIME)

  • A new survey showed that a majority of clinicians surveyed feel it’s important that the health system they work for plays a role in addressing climate change. (Commonwealth Fund)

Events & opportunities

We’re going to be at ViVE, February 25 - 28, 2024! Come say hello at the events we’ll be featured at, or email us hello@ourclimatehealth.org to find time to CHILL together. 

  • Climate Change & Health Equity: Tech Solutions for Marginalized Communities on Monday 2/26, 2:50 - 3:20 pm (Impact Stage in ViVE Central Pavilion).

  • Pioneering the Intersection of Climate, Health, and Innovation on Sunday 2/25, 3pm - 5pm PT (Room 409AB, Level 2, Meeting Concourse).

Other events and opportunities in the coming weeks:

  • Physician and academic innovators will be holding a discussion on Climate Change and Children's Health: Challenges and Solutions is happening online on Feb 13. Register.

  • The International Conference on Climate Change and Human Health Impacts will be taking place on March 10 in New York. Register.

  • The Urban-X Accelerator in New York is looking for founders building businesses in areas such as Mobility, Buildings, Energy, Circularity, and Community. Apply.

  • Annual meeting of the Medical Society Consortium on Climate and Health Feb 11-13 Register. 

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