Thousands of hospitals worldwide are “at high risk of total or partial shutdown from extreme weather events” if fossil fuels are not phased out by the end of the century, a report by XDI, a climate-risk data analysis company said on Saturday.
The report comes as world leaders meet to discuss the impact of climate change on health at the COP28 UN climate summit in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, and the benefit to health of reducing emissions.
XDI analyzed about 200,000 hospitals globally for risk of damage from climate change hazards and concluded that one-in-12 of them — 16,000 — are at high risk of total or partial shutdown from extreme weather without a phaseout of fossil fuels.
“The risk of damage to hospitals from extreme weather events has already increased by 41 percent since 1990 due to greenhouse gas emissions,” the report said.
However, “limiting global warming to 1.8°C with a rapid phaseout of fossil fuels would halve the damage risk to hospital infrastructure compared to a high emissions scenario,” it added.
Hospitals near coastlines or next to rivers are most at risk, and of the 16,000 hospitals at high risk, 71 percent of them are in low and middle-income countries, it said.
Southeast Asia has the highest proportion of hospitals at risk — 18 percent.
One such hospital is Tondo Medical Center in Manila, a state hospital in the Philippine capital’s largest slum. It is one of 300 hospitals in the country listed as being at high risk.
“We are at high risk because we’re very near bodies of water and stand on reclaimed area,” Tondo medicial director Maria Isabelita Estrella said.
Estrella said the hospital was already no stranger to severe flooding, and patients and staff had at times had to ride on trucks to reach the facility.
Experts say that hospitals need data to mitigate and adapt their health services to prevent disruption caused by climate change.
XDI director of science and technology Karl Mallon said that by releasing the risk assessments and ratings of more than 200,000 hospitals globally, hospital administrators and governments have the climate data they need to adapt and prepare health facilities for extreme weather events.
Renzo Guinto, a doctor and an expert on planetary and global health in Southeast Asia, said the report was a “cause for alarm for the health sector.”
“We cannot anymore ignore climate change as a threat to healthcare provision and health systems operations,” he said. “We need to better plan where to build our future hospitals and where to relocate the existing hospitals.”
Mallon said raising hospital floors and strengthening roofs could help address flooding and extreme winds, but relocating away from rivers and coasts to higher ground was a more costly option.
“Governments have a duty to populations to ensure the ongoing delivery of critical services,” he said. “For individual governments not to take action on this information, or for the global community not to support governments in need, is a blatant disregard for the wellbeing of their citizens.”
‘UNUSUAL EVENT’: The Australian defense minister said that the Chinese navy task group was entitled to be where it was, but Australia would be watching it closely The Australian and New Zealand militaries were monitoring three Chinese warships moving unusually far south along Australia’s east coast on an unknown mission, officials said yesterday. The Australian government a week ago said that the warships had traveled through Southeast Asia and the Coral Sea, and were approaching northeast Australia. Australian Minister for Defence Richard Marles yesterday said that the Chinese ships — the Hengyang naval frigate, the Zunyi cruiser and the Weishanhu replenishment vessel — were “off the east coast of Australia.” Defense officials did not respond to a request for comment on a Financial Times report that the task group from
Chinese authorities said they began live-fire exercises in the Gulf of Tonkin on Monday, only days after Vietnam announced a new line marking what it considers its territory in the body of water between the nations. The Chinese Maritime Safety Administration said the exercises would be focused on the Beibu Gulf area, closer to the Chinese side of the Gulf of Tonkin, and would run until tomorrow evening. It gave no further details, but the drills follow an announcement last week by Vietnam establishing a baseline used to calculate the width of its territorial waters in the Gulf of Tonkin. State-run Vietnam News
DEFENSE UPHEAVAL: Trump was also to remove the first woman to lead a military service, as well as the judge advocates general for the army, navy and air force US President Donald Trump on Friday fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force General C.Q. Brown, and pushed out five other admirals and generals in an unprecedented shake-up of US military leadership. Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social that he would nominate former lieutenant general Dan “Razin” Caine to succeed Brown, breaking with tradition by pulling someone out of retirement for the first time to become the top military officer. The president would also replace the head of the US Navy, a position held by Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to lead a military service,
Four decades after they were forced apart, US-raised Adamary Garcia and her birth mother on Saturday fell into each other’s arms at the airport in Santiago, Chile. Without speaking, they embraced tearfully: A rare reunification for one the thousands of Chileans taken from their mothers as babies and given up for adoption abroad. “The worst is over,” Edita Bizama, 64, said as she beheld her daughter for the first time since her birth 41 years ago. Garcia had flown to Santiago with four other women born in Chile and adopted in the US. Reports have estimated there were 20,000 such cases from 1950 to
RSS