This session explores the evolving healthcare landscape, highlighting the growing impact of climate change on patient demand, service delivery, and system costs. It reframes climate resilience and low-carbon care as essential to performance, supporting efficiency, quality, and better patient outcomes. Through the CRACCO framework and real-world examples, participants will discover practical, scalable approaches already driving meaningful impact. The session also equips leaders with actionable strategies to advance and expand these initiatives across organizations and systems.
Objectives:
1. To understand the current healthcare system context, including the growing impact of climate change on patient demand and service delivery, alongside healthcare’s own environmental footprint and the resulting financial and operational costs of inaction.
2. To reframe climate resilience and low-carbon care as core components of healthcare system performance, demonstrating how they directly support efficiency, cost containment, quality, and patient outcomes within existing priorities rather than as additional work.
3. To explore practical and scalable approaches to implementation through the CRACCO framework, using real-world examples of grassroots initiatives embedded within existing structures that have driven measurable operational and cultural impact.
4. To identify actionable leadership strategies that enable change at all levels of the system, supporting the spread and scaling of local initiatives into broader organizational and national momentum despite competing priorities.
Featured Speaker:
Dr. Bhavini Gohel, Clinical Associate Professor, University of Calgary; Director of Climate Health System Alliance, O'Brien Public Health Institute
Dr. Bhavini Gohel is a Clinical Associate Professor at the Cumming School of Medicine, University of Calgary, and a Hospitalist and Care of the Elderly Physician with Alberta Health Services (AHS). She serves as the Provincial Medical Lead for Professional Affairs at AHS, where she is involved in advancing physician professionalism, and system-level processes.
She is the Founder and Director of the Climate Health System Alliance at the O’Brien Institute for Public Health, University of Calgary, and serves as Director of International Partnerships and Health System Collaboration for the Canadian Coalition for Green Health Care. Her work focuses on transforming healthcare systems toward low-carbon, climate-resilient models, which include leadership.
Dr. Gohel has provided technical advisory support to the Climate Action Advisory Committee, as well as to climate resiliency and emergency disaster management technical committees with Health Standards Organization and Accreditation Canada. She has co-chaired World Health Organization technical teams on climate and healthcare leadership and collaborates closely with the WHO Health Professional Constituency.
Her research and leadership are centered on integrating sustainability, resilience, and equity into healthcare systems. She is also Co-Founder and Chair of the Brain Climate Equity Collaborative, a national initiative advancing the intersection of climate change, brain health, and equity. Dr. Gohel has global health experience in India and Pakistan and holds a Master’s in Global Health Leadership from Saïd Business School, University of Oxford.
