The ATACH Community of Practice resource repository aims to make resources which directly support delivery of the COP26 Health commitments easily accessible.
The resources can be filtered by:
- Resource type
- ATACH working group
- COP26 commitments
- Geographic applicability
Safe, climate-resilient and environmentally sustainable health care facilities: an overview
This guidance summarizes key information and strategies for creating safe, climate-resilient, and environmentally sustainable health care facilities. It provides definitions, actionable guidance, and resources for implementation by health care managers, practitioners, and national authorities.
Plant-powered Planet: Building a Healthy and Sustainable Food System
This evidence-based policy report highlights the importance of food system transformation for health and sustainability. It outlines key policy interventions to address interlinked challenges of food insecurity, environmental degradation, and health.
Lessons from patient safety to accelerate healthcare decarbonization
This article outlines key lessons learnt and best practices from the field of patient safety which could serve as catalysts to accelerate healthcare decarbonization and reduce greenwashing. It describes challenges and opportunities for healthcare sustainability efforts and provides several recommendations for additional steps to prevent greenwashing for voluntary sustainability programs.
National policies to accelerate climate action in US healthcare
This manuscript published in Nature Climate Change describes efforts to mobilize climate actions for U.S. healthcare, which contributes about 8.5% of national greenhouse gas emissions. The authors detail recommendations for...
Health Care Actions for Reducing Plastic Use and Pollution
This article describes how plastic waste from healthcare, much of which consists of single-use plastic devices, harms the environment and human health. The authors discuss sociotechnical approaches to reduce healthcare plastics...
Quality criteria for integrating health into Nationally Determined Contributions
The document provides guidance for integrating health into countries' Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), aiming to improve their quality and ambition. It supports national officials in understanding climate plans and key entry points for health, covering a structured approach, quality criteria, examples, and resources to address health impacts and promote climate-resilient and low-carbon sustainable health systems.
Health systems decarbonization: Lessons learned in building capacities in the sector
This brief presents key lessons learnt from Health Care Without Harm’s experience in greenhouse gas (GHG) national baselining, action planning initiatives, and capacity-building strategies. These lessons learnt can help shape future approaches for countries working to measure and reduce health care-related emissions and enhance sustainability.
WHO Case Study Series on Climate Change and Health (2022)
This case study series was published by the WHO in response to a call for case studies on climate and health in 2021-2022, in the momentum of COP26. These case studies showcase examples of work that is already being implemented...
Transition to sustainable plastic packaging for consumer healthcare products
This Position Paper from the Global Self Care Federation (GSCF) outlines the consumer healthcare industry's perspective on policies needed to enhance sustainable packaging for non-prescription medicines and food supplements. It...
Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Emissions Sectoral Guidance
This Sectoral Guidance document is designed as a simplified sectoral guidance to supplement general GHG protocol guidance. It aims to assist self-care suppliers in developing a GHG reduction strategy by providing non-technical...
Smart Hospital Initiative: Toolkit
This toolkit provides health system administrators and policymakers a practical guide to strengthening structural and operational aspects and providing green technologies, in order to improve hospitals' resilience and reduce their carbon footprint.
Online training course: Climate Change and Health
This is an interactive online course to understand the interlinkages between climate change and health and the opportunities for addressing the health risks of climate change, building climate resilient and low carbon health systems, promoting the health co-benefits of climate action, and being able to communicate this new knowledge to others.
Carbon Emissions Learning Lab
The Carbon Emissions Learning Lab (CELL) is an on-line platform to train users on decision making to achieve net zero health systems. It is a learning tool for leaders in the healthcare sector who are navigating net zero health systems. CELL provides users with a realistic, low-risk simulation, powered by real-world data, to analyze the implementation of carbon-reduction initiatives in hospital systems. CELL empowers users to become climate leaders through informed, sustainability-oriented decision-making.
Target setting for low carbon sustainable health systems
This document contains key considerations and a practical checklist to assist health system administrators and policy makers in setting credible and ambitious decarbonization targets for the health sector.
Operational framework for building climate resilient and low carbon health systems
This document presents the WHO Operational framework for building climate resilient and low carbon health systems. The framework’s goal is to increase the climate resilience of health systems to protect and improve the health of communities in an unstable and changing climate, while optimizing the use of resources and implementing strategies to reduce GHG emissions.
Red and processed meat in the context of health and the environment: many shades of red and green. Information brief
This document synthesizes the evidence on the role of red and processed meat production and consumption in health and environmental outcomes and in different social and political contexts. It also provides a brief overview of potential interventions to optimize health/environmental outcomes.
Climate Action and Nutrition: Pathways to Impact
This I-CAN paper highlights the evidence on how climate change and nutrition are interconnected through food, water, social protection and health systems and identifies 30 integrated actions, with associated key enablers, to accelerate progress on nutrition and climate outcomes.
Aga Khan Development Network’s Tool to Calculate Health Operations Emissions
This Excel tool calculates the GHG emissions of health care facility operations. It converts readily available data from health facilities and community-based programs into instant carbon read-outs using accurate and up-to-date carbon conversion factors. Downloads include: Excel tool and guidance document in both English and French.
Climate Impact Checkup Tool and guidance
The Climate Impact Checkup tool can be used to assess GHG emissions baselines of health care facilities using facility-level data on energy, transport, waste, and gases to then calculate footprints based on national or local emissions factors. Downloads include: Excel tool, two training videos, guidance document and slides for users and trainers.
Designing a Net Zero Roadmap for Healthcare: Technical methodology and Guidance
This resource describes a methodology, which includes guiding principles and methods, for a national or regional health authority to measure their health systems emissions and develop a decarbonisation roadmap that is compatible with the 2015 Paris Agreement.