Health

 WhoWhatWhy - n August 2023, time was running out for health care workers along Florida’s Gulf Coast. Hospital administrators and staff had to decide how they would prepare themselves, their patients, and their facilities as Hurricane Idalia — a Category 4 — closed in on the coastline. Faced with the possibility of a 6-foot storm surge that would engulf streets and potentially flood the lower levels of the hospitals, four hospitals and eight free-standing emergency rooms in the Tampa Bay metro area were shut down. The hospitals transported patients to safer ground by ambulance.

Within a month, health care leaders in two other major US cities would confront similar tests. On the West Coast, historic rainfall cut power to a hospital in Los Angeles, while in New York, torrential downpours caused a power outage and electrical damage at a hospital in Brooklyn — both incidents prompting emergency evacuations. The recent hospital closures in the United States illustrate a larger trend that’s already in motion. Human-driven climate change has increased the risk of damage to hospitals by 41 percent between 1990 and 2020, according to a December 2023 report published by XDI, or Cross Dependency Initiative, an Australian climate risk data company. More

Thousands of health care facilities around the world are buckling under the effects of climate change, a trend experts predict will worsen in the coming decades as extreme weather increases pressure on hospital infrastructure and simultaneously creates more demand for care.