sustainable healthcare media analysis
Environmental Health News

Code Green: Burnout, climate change and equity

A look at the year in sustainable healthcare coverage shows public moving beyond PPE and Covid.

Welcome to summer. Let's step back and take in a year's worth of sustainable healthcare coverage in one sweep.


The above graph shows the 1,553 stories, each represented by a dot, published since last June that our software picked up.

  • X-axis: Number of media outlets publishing the story
  • Y-axis: Count of social media posts sharing that story
  • Colors represent thematic clusters.

Note that both axes are logarithmic.

Focus this week on the upper right quadrant: Stories that proved popular by media editors and social media users alike.

  • They got seen and shared, and they drove conversations.

Three main themes dominated the most widely read and shared stories:

  1. Staff burnout & shortages (red dots)
  2. Climate change (purple)
  3. Healthcare inequity (teal)

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Staff burnout & climate change

sustainable healthcare coverage climate change

The big red dot, with some 27,000 media shares, is a Texas Tribune article from August about Texas' acute healthcare worker shortage amid staff burnout and a Covid-19 surge. It wasn't just Texas: Quite a few red dots representing stories focused on staffing sit in this most popular quadrant.

What we find encouraging is the number of purple dots in that quadrant, representing stories focused on climate change – such as this piece from ABC News national correspondent Chris Conte on doctors incorporating climate change into their practices.

It's going to become a more frequent topic for healthcare globally, with reports just this week of more than 1,000 people hospitalized in Iraq as dust storms ravaged the Middle East.

Inequity in healthcare

healthcare equity coverage

Equally heartening is the plethora of teal in the graph's upper quadrant. Each of those represents a story on inequity in health care, such as this Stateline piece from September on how pandemic health inequities highlight the need for better obesity prevention.

Stay with us on that last point, as Environmental Health Sciences will be hosting a conference this fall on obesogens – hormone hijacking compounds in medical and consumer products that alter our body chemistry and contribute to obesity.

Overall, we'd say the coverage trend suggests the media and public are moving on from the intense focus on PPE and Covid we've seen in the healthcare sustainability space since the pandemic hit.

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Photo by Wes Warren on Unsplash

Penn State expanding weather network, offering data that could help areas prepare for floods

Penn State is expanding a tool to give the public access to weather information across the state. Data from the project could help communities prepare for severe storms and flooding, which are expected to increase in Pennsylvania as the climate changes.

Senator Whitehouse & climate change

Senator Whitehouse puts climate change on budget committee’s agenda

For more than a decade, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse gave daily warnings about the mounting threat of climate change. Now he has a powerful new perch.

Unheralded environmentalist: Jimmy Carter’s green legacy

With the former president now in hospice care, Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Kai Bird looks back on Jimmy Carter’s environmental record in the White House — from his sweeping protection of Alaska’s wild lands to his efforts to push the nation toward renewable energy.

Melting Antarctic ice predicted to cause rapid slowdown of deep ocean current by 2050

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Sajed Kamal: M.A.D. or collective survival?

Aggressively pursued behind the façade of energy independence from foreign sources and domestic job creation, short-term, highly profitable fracking has accelerated the path to long-term economic, environmental and public health catastrophe.

antarctic sea climate warming ice
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Western Antarctic sea loses 3 trillion tons of ice in 25 years, study finds

The Amundsen Sea in western Antarctica has been hit particularly hard by the catastrophic effects of climate change, losing over three trillion tons of ice in just 25 years. This region stands out as one of the areas most severely affected by extreme weather conditions.

Nuclear dispute hangs over EU renewable energy talks

The European Union enters the final stage of tense talks over how to treat hydrogen produced using nuclear power on Wednesday, in an effort to end a dispute that threatens to thwart a deal on more ambitious renewable energy goals.
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UK’s green industrial strategy delayed until autumn, Chancellor says

Climate and energy analysts said the UK risks losing the global race to develop green industries if it does not announce policies now.
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