In an article first published in Canadian Healthcare Facilities, Lisa Westerhoff, who leads the Climate Policy & Planning team at Integral Group in Vancouver, reports on a presentation she gave at the Canadian Healthcare Engineering Society British Columbia Chapter Conference in Whistler last June, in which she and two co-speakers ‘unpacked and demystified how to integrate climate resilience into healthcare facilities’.
With record-breaking temperatures increasingly becoming the new normal across Canada, and catastrophic wildfires and floods a not-too-distant memory, the time for climate resilience planning was yesterday. Globally, we have seen 1.1 °C of warming since pre-industrial times, and Canada is warming faster than the global average, due to its northern latitude.
At the 2022 Canadian Healthcare Engineering Society (CHES) British Columbia chapter conference in Whistler, I was joined by Craig Dedels, manager of Climate Risk and Resilience for Vancouver Coastal Health, and Jolene McLaughlin, Sustainability director at EllisDon, in a session titled, ‘Planning and designing for climate resilience in health facilities’. We unpacked and demystified how to integrate climate resilience into healthcare facilities, and showed how sector leaders could drive meaningful change in the collective efforts for a resilient, low-carbon future. Here is a summary of that session to inspire healthcare design teams to consider their shared responsibility in building a climate-resilient Canada.
A call to action
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