Healthcare exists to heal and protect, yet Europe’s healthcare systems generate significant carbon emissions, depend heavily on polluting single-use plastics and toxic chemicals, and contribute to antimicrobial resistance.

This paradox demands urgent action. The European healthcare sector must reconcile its mission to ‘do no harm’ with the reality of a steadily growing environmental impact that is damaging the health of both people and planet. The sector therefore faces an urgent dual mandate: to build resilience against climate threats while dramatically reducing its own environmental footprint.

This is even more important now. The second half of the 2020s is a critical period for global action on reducing the long-term effects of climate change. Governments are failing to work together to reduce carbon emissions fast enough. The global target they set in 2015’s Paris Agreement to limit global warming ‘ideally to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels’ will be shattered in the second half of the decade, with the aim of keeping temperatures ‘well below’ 2°C by 2030 unlikely to be achieved. The effects of this failure are increasingly apparent with the growing number of extreme weather events, such as ferocious heatwaves in many parts of the world, already severely impacting populations, the economy, and human and planetary health.