Cop28: Thousands of hospitals at high shutdown risk if fossil fuels are not phased out, report warns
- Some 16,000 hospitals are seen at high risk, with Southeast Asia having the highest proportion under threat
- The report comes as world leaders meet to discuss the impact of climate change on health at the Cop28 United Nations summit in Dubai
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 United Nations climate summit in Dubai, and the benefit to health of reducing emissions.
XDI analysed some 200,000 hospitals globally for risk of damage from climate change hazards and concluded one in 12 of them – 16,000 – are at high risk of total or partial shutdown from extreme weather without a phase-out of fossil fuels.
“The risk of damage to hospitals from extreme weather events has already increased by 41 per cent since 1990 due to greenhouse gas emissions,” the report said.
But, it said, “limiting global warming to 1.8 degrees Celsius with a rapid phase-out of fossil fuels would halve the damage risk to hospital infrastructure compared to a high emissions scenario”.
Hospitals near coastlines or next to rivers are most at risk, the report said, and of the 16,000 hospitals at high risk, 71 per cent of them are in low- and middle-income countries.
