BONUS: Climate Resilience in Healthcare - Perspectives from New Zealand

Hosted by: Phil Dillard

In this follow-up to our last episode on climate resilience, Host Laura Kirkvold, Sustainability Working Group Leader with Inogen Alliance and Consultant with Antea Group USA, sits down with James Hughes, Technical Director for Climate and Resilience and Strategic Consulting at Tonkin + Taylor to elaborate on the topic, with a focus on the healthcare sector in New Zealand. James highlights the interconnection between environmental challenges and systemic disparities, including access to healthcare in a timely manner.

Laura Kirkvold

Antea Group - USA

Laura is a consultant at Antea Group USA with 10+ years of sustainability and consulting experience supporting leading global companies with reporting and disclosure, strategic program development and management, and responsible supply chain practices. She facilitates multi-stakeholder engagement driving for circularity in the healthcare plastics industry through her work with the Healthcare Plastics Recycling Council, and she leads the Sustainability Working Group for the Inogen Alliance. Laura started her career in supply chain and corporate retail and has an educational background in environmental policy and management and international studies with degrees from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Lund University in Sweden.

James Hughes

James has a 20-year career in the infrastructure and environmental sectors and leads Tonkin + Taylor’s climate change and resilience advisory practice. His career to date has also spanned work within infrastructure planning and design, risk management, and sustainability. James led the ‘Built Environment’ domain of New Zealand’s first National Climate Change Risk Assessment and was part of the Ministry for Environment’s Climate Change Adaptation Technical Working Group. He has been part of the Deep South Science Challenge, and in 2021, he led the development of the Ministry for Environment’s ‘Guide to local climate change risk assessments.’ He has been involved with many climate change risk assessments, scenario planning projects, and climate-related disclosures for the public and private sector and is passionate about building robust and transparent approaches to underpin these.

Time Stamps
(00:29) Tonkin + Taylor’s report: Key findings

(04:09) How the healthcare context is unique

(08:38) How climate risk exacerbates inequities

(11:26) Recommendations for companies

“ When you start looking at the broader, interconnected issues with delivering a healthcare system over the long term, and that requires, obviously funding from government, ongoing improvements to the healthcare system, at the same time at which climate change impacts are not only affecting the healthcare system, but the broader economy. You can quite plausibly develop scenarios where all those things coincide in a very difficult situation and problematic situation where funding goes down, climate impacts go up and, for example, waiting times increase, more people transition to private healthcare, if they can afford it," James Hughes, Tonkin + Taylor.