As a continent at the forefront of extreme heat, wildfires, and drought, Australia offers unique lessons for U.S. employers navigating climate risk.
This article is part of the National Commission on Climate and Workforce Health’s series “Climate Prescription.”
Written by Dr. Leah B. Topper, a family medicine physician and Climate & Health Science Policy Fellow at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, the series translates the latest research on climate-driven health risks into practical insights for employers, HR leaders, and workplace health professionals.
As extreme weather events increase in frequency and severity, it is important to prepare our society and infrastructure for these events through climate resiliency efforts. Climate resilience is the capacity to prepare for, respond to, and recover from hazardous events and stresses related to climate change.
For those like me in healthcare, it is also a framework for reducing preventable harm and supporting our patients and community through climate-related events. Extreme weather events can result in direct healthcare costs, including emergency department visits, hospitalizations, higher levels of care, and increased prescription medication use. There are also direct health consequences on individuals, including exacerbations of chronic disease, disruptions to healthcare access, and mental health consequences.
Extreme weather also generates substantial workplace costs, including injury and illness, reduced productivity, increased accidents, infrastructure damage, and the risk of injury during emergency response and recovery work. Stronger resilience systems offer an opportunity to reduce each of these cost categories.
Climate reports, or climate action plans, are a good place to articulate concrete climate resiliency plans at the workplace. In order to care for the worker, resilience guidelines should include worker health measures.
A recent paper examined Australia’s top 500 corporations’ climate reports and their engagement in health. Approximately 10 percent of those companies had published a climate report as of April 2024, and these tended to be larger corporations and those with higher emissions. Almost all of these reports included health content. The most common topics were workplace safety, mental health, heat, and air quality — and roughly two-thirds of reports described specific actions to address health impacts.
More specifically, companies described heat stress monitoring at major operating facilities, severe weather management plans for outdoor work, the installation of air filters in commercial buildings, the scheduling of major maintenance campaigns during cooler months to limit heat exposure, and the refurbishment of buildings to improve resilience. These are practical, protective measures embedded in formal corporate planning alongside emissions targets.
In my clinic, climate resilience can look like identifying which patients may lack transportation options due to age or disability, determining who should be counseled on staying safe during days of poor air quality, and considering which patients should adjust their medication regimens on days of higher heat to reduce the risk of dehydration or heat-related illness.
Much of this work currently happens through one-on-one counseling. There is significant potential, however, to operate at a broader, population-based level. Within a healthcare system, this could be a mass message to all patients with essential medications due for refill, advising them to refill before a predicted hurricane arrives. This could be a micro-grid or back up generator on the property of a clinic or hospital that provides energy when the larger power system goes offline.
However, adults spend far more time at work than they do in the doctor’s office, and in many cases more than they spend at home. Health and extreme weather guidance delivered through an employer therefore has a reach and an immediacy that the clinical encounter alone cannot match. As extreme weather continues, the workplace will be an increasingly important setting for protecting health.
Climate resilience is not solely the domain of sustainability officers or emergency planners. It belongs in the exam room and on the worksite.
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