Green Health Challenges

Global Green and Healthy Hospitals (GGHH) is challenging its robust network of over 1,000 members representing the interests of more than 32,100 hospitals in 51 countries, to commit to reducing their environmental footprint via a new initiative: the Green Health Challenges.

The Green Health Challenges initially focus on two of the ten GGHH Sustainability Goals: Waste and Energy. They also include GGHH’s, Health Care Climate Challenge, which already has more than 160 member participants.

The Green Health Challenges are a data-driven initiative, designed to help healthcare organizations commit to sustainability goals and track their own environmental projects and efforts.

Each Challenge contains a series of targets, indicators and focus areas that provide a pathway for individual members, and for the GGHH network as a whole, to measurably reduce their footprint.

We have designed the Green Health Challenges with a multi-tier structure that allows members to pick and choose goals according to their specific capabilities and resources. This design aims to make the Challenges accessible to GGHH members of all sizes and levels of sustainability experience.

Through data submission on the Hippocrates Data Center, members can report, track and visualize their progress while contributing to an aggregated global view of the GGHH network’s efforts to reduce their environmental footprint.

As members achieve progress and reach Green Health Challenge milestones, they will receive public recognition through the international Green Health Awards.

The focus areas of each challenge align with the challenges of the Healthier Hospitals program in the United States, which have hundreds of hospital and health system participants. Healthier Hospitals is a program of Practice Greenhealth (GGHH’s implementation arm in the U.S.).

Every member can play a leadership role by engaging in the Green Health Challenges. Collectively members’ participation sends a powerful message to hospitals and health systems everywhere that we can achieve environmentally sustainable health care.

Waste Challenge

Each and every hospital, large and small, rural and urban, can have a positive impact on the public and environmental health of their community through sustainable health care waste management.

By reducing and segregating health care waste, health care facilities can reduce their operational costs, enhance community relations and even generate revenue.

Together, as a collective, Waste Challenge participants from around the globe form a powerful, leading voice and example for the global health sector to follow.

Energy Challenge

The Energy Challenge offers members a framework that enables them to benchmark their energy consumption, while empowering them to conserve energy and reduce emissions.

In the process of healing patients every day, the health care sector uses a significant amount of
energy. By using less energy and obtaining it from cleaner sources, hospitals can reduce the
amount of emissions they release and lower the risk of respiratory illness. In addition to offering
health benefits, energy conservation benefits a hospital’s bottom line.

Health Care Climate Challenge

The Health Care Climate Challenge is an initiative to mobilize health care institutions around the globe to protect public health from climate change.

By moving toward low carbon health systems, health care can mitigate its own climate impact, save money and lead by example. By becoming more resilient, health care can help prepare for the growing impacts of climate change. And by providing societal leadership the health sector can help forge a vision of a future with healthy hospitals and healthy people living on a healthy planet.