The health of our planet is intertwined with the health of our bodies; we cannot save the patient when the hospital is on fire. However, Dr Gudrun Hubinger, co-founder of Climate Health Collective, argues that embracing ‘One Health’ is foundational to safeguarding human and planetary life.
The last few meters were a struggle – a battle for oxygen.
At 5,000 meters above sea level, walking speed is much slower, and every few hundred meters requires a deliberate pause, a conscious cycle of breathing to keep moving. At that altitude, our lungs only have about half the capacity they do at sea level.
When I finally turned to the incredible view of the Gokyo Lakes in the Khumbu Region of Nepal, and the towering peaks of the Himalayas, their vastness showed me a world that felt both eternal and impossibly fragile.
Below and around those water reservoirs (rated amongst the highest in the world), extraordinary cloud and wind formations cascade like a stream over icefalls and glaciers. (View my photo, Cloud River, featured in September of the 2026 World Meteorological Organization calendar.)
During that trip, both local Sherpa communities and scientists from Tribhuvan University shared more about the water crisis currently facing the region. These peaks are the water towers for two billion people downstream, more than a quarter of the world’s population. A shift of just a few tenths of a degree Celsius doesn’t just melt ice; it disrupts the lifeblood of an entire region.
When an ecosystem becomes this sick, humans and animals connected feel the impact. In other words, when we make the planet sick, our health and well-being are at risk, too.
We often treat climate change as a distant, exterior event, but the reality is that we are in the midst of it – an internalized biological stressor. While we are currently the problem, we are also the solution. Our goal isn’t to ‘save the planet’ as a separate entity, but to mend the shared circuit system that keeps us all alive.
The Healthcare Paradox
Two decades of working in the biopharma industry, focusing on access to information on medicines through a global pandemic, brought me much closer to the topic of One Health. I began to look deeper at the interconnectedness of the overall system, the way that the planet, animals, and humans are bound together.
One Health isn’t just a theory; rather, it is the recognition that our medical clinics do not have walls. It is an approach that acknowledges our health is bound to the health of animals and the environment we share. For decades, we’ve treated these as separate balance sheets. But we’ve learned that a disrupted forest or a contaminated river is as much a healthcare issue as a chronic disease.
The One Health lens is a game-changer; it shifts our focus from reactive treatment to systemic resilience, recognizing that we cannot protect the patient if the shared circuit that sustains them is breaking down.
There is a profound conundrum at the heart of our work as health professionals: we spend our lives researching diseases and molecules to save patients, yet the healthcare sector itself, from hospitals to global supply chains, contributes almost 5% of global greenhouse gas emissions. A footprint that rivals, and in some regions exceeds, the entire global aviation industry. If the sector were a country, it would be the fifth-largest emitter on the planet.
We are essentially working to heal the patient while the hospital is on fire. You cannot have healthy people on a heated, sweating, and polluted planet, choking on its own emissions.
We are essentially working to heal the patient while the hospital is on fire. You cannot have healthy people on a heated, sweating, and polluted planet, choking on its own emissions.
Gudrun HubingerThe Diagnosis
We often think of climate change as something happening far away, but it is an internalized health crisis. While the greenhouse gas effect is a natural process that protects the planet (if kept in balance), the anthropogenic impact of fossil fuels has caused a heat-trapping effect that pushes the human body to its biological limit.
Our biology was not designed for the pace at which our environment is shifting. When we talk about global warming, we aren’t just talking about melting ice caps; instead, we are talking about the core homeostatic systems of the human body struggling to keep pace with a planet moving outside its comfort zone.
Extreme heat is a cardiovascular stress test.
As clinicians and researchers, we are seeing the disease frontier shift in real-time as dust, pollen, and vector-borne illnesses, such as malaria and dengue, move into new backyards, turning seasonal allergies into chronic respiratory burdens and launching disease patterns in countries where they weren’t seen before. This isn’t a crisis we can age out of; climate change acts as a cumulative stressor, basically from the fetal brain and lung development of newborns to the cognitive and cardiovascular resilience of older adults.
But we are seeing this shift as people, too. Even in my chosen home in the Gulf, we have witnessed unprecedented rainfalls and storms that defy historical patterns.
And the toll isn’t just physical. There is also Solastalgia to consider, the heavy, creeping grief of watching your home environment change beyond recognition; a condition particularly observed in island nations facing rising sea levels. It is the unique trauma of losing your sense of place while you are still standing in it.
When the landscape that defines your community becomes unrecognizable, it creates a chronic mental load that our current healthcare systems are not yet built to address.
It is a constant mental load: the silent anxiety of trying to protect ourselves from air quality we cannot control or extreme weather events we cannot stop.
The Prescription
So, how do we balance the ledger? If our diagnosis shows a broken circuit, we cannot rely on the same outdated tools that allowed the breach in the first place.
While all eyes are on renewables, aviation, and agriculture, health must become a central face of climate action. Ultimately, the most effective way to decarbonize healthcare is to reduce the need for it through systemic prevention and the pursuit of longevity.
- Operational Sustainability: Healthcare and the private sector must lead by greening their own manufacturing and supply chains. We must transition to low-carbon service delivery, using renewable energy for infrastructure and low-carbon medicines. Furthermore, companies can play a pivotal role in reducing plastic pollution through innovations in packaging, waste reduction, and recycling –essential steps toward a circular economy.
- Climate Health Literacy: This is where we need the science translators. We need science communication and journalism that connects the dots between a melting glacier and the price of medicine on a local pharmacy shelf. Patients need to understand the issue without heavy jargon to respond and take action.
- Active Participation: As readers, we must demand transparency and support systems. For example, promoting agroecology, or making personal health choices like active transport, a planet-friendly diet, and reducing food waste and consumption.
Healing the Future
Changing global systems is expensive and incredibly difficult. However, ignoring the planet’s fever is a far costlier path. This isn’t just a biological crisis; it is an economic and security one. We are essentially paying a ‘Human Capital Tax’ on every degree of warming, measured in lost workdays, hospital bills, and the astronomical strain on our healthcare systems.
This is where the One Health approach becomes our most vital tool. By treating the system as a whole, we have a chance to cool down our future. This is not a challenge restricted to boardrooms or the halls of power – it is a shared responsibility that must be met from the top down and the bottom up.
We are all part of this system, and the solutions must be both global in scale and local in action.
Thinking back to that photo of the Cloud River, the question comes up: don’t we want future generations to see a planet that is just as beautiful and full of natural resources?
As One Health teaches us, we are all part of this system, and the solutions must come from everyone.
