Looking forward: 2025 and beyond

[6 MIN READ]

In this article:

• Providence is eager to build on past achievements and launch new initiatives to continue to work toward carbon negative by 2030. 

• In 2025, we plan to make significant strides in our clinical environmental stewardship initiative, establish a strategy to reduce our reliance on natural gas in all facilities, expand our data collection and assess our procurement.  

• Our short-term goals lay the groundwork for long-term goals as we remain dedicated to investment, innovation, collaboration and creating a healthier world for all.

Providence has bold environmental stewardship goals for 2025 and beyond, rooted in hard work, data and success stories. As we look to the new year, we remain committed to our vision of Health for a Better World. Learn more about how our short- and long-term environmental stewardship goals supplement robust initiatives already in action and pave the way for discoveries and accomplishments.

Expanding our clinical environmental stewardship initiative

In 2025, we are expanding our clinical environmental stewardship initiative to transform our clinical practices to minimize environmental impact while maintaining high-quality patient care. 

“Most of our employees are clinical,” says Beth Schenk, Ph.D., Chief Environmental Stewardship Officer for Providence. “For us to make significant change, we need the input of clinical caregivers.” 

The environmental stewardship team understands that caregivers are busy and often don’t instinctively know tangible ways to decrease carbon impacts from their practices. Also challenging is the need to address clinical care in wide-ranging facilities, including everything from critical access hospitals and quaternary care centers to home care and specialty care.

“We have some examples of things that we’ve already been successful at,” Schenk says. “For example, the work that we’ve talked about in the past regarding nitrous oxide and anesthetics. That’s a clinical care decision that can decrease pollution.”

Part of this initiative will involve finding ways to keep people healthier, which reduces strain on health care in general. 

“That’s a win-win for all of us,” Schenk says. “If we can help keep people healthier, that typically means they would use fewer resources in care treatment.”

Beyond 2025, Providence plans to develop and implement innovative approaches to determine best practices, measure and report results, reduce consumption and build resiliency.

“There’s a lot involved with clinical care, including education, outreach, engagement, and also understanding what the best practices are because that’s not often known,” Schenk says. “That requires an analysis of comparing products, processes, policies and procedures. That’s long-term work.”

Developing a roadmap for decarbonization

We remain committed to reducing our reliance on natural gas in existing buildings. To that end, we recently published a study in association with the American Hospital Association and the American Society of Health Care Engineering to understand what that process might look like on a broad scale. This year we plan to develop a strategy to reduce reliance on natural gas in all our facilities. 

Across the nation, new buildings are using electricity for heating. But like most older health care systems, Providence relies on fossil fuels to heat its nearly 40 million square feet of existing buildings.

“It will take careful and long-term planning because there are multiple steps,” Schenk says. “First, and probably most important, is ensuring our buildings are running very efficiently so that the switch from natural gas to electricity doesn’t skyrocket our demand.” 

Schenk expects reducing reliance on natural gas to take a decade or more. In the next 10-plus years, we plan to modernize our buildings, adopt heat recovery systems and prepare for the electrification of power plants.

Expanding our WE ACT scorecard

Since 2019, we have been dedicated to a data-driven approach to capture the usage, cost and carbon emissions of specific resources and commodities from all our hospitals. 

This data has proven to be a gold mine of information that helps us better understand challenges, initiatives that reduce carbon quickly, cost-saving opportunities, and how our hospitals compare internally and nationwide.

“It gives us a real visual and an understanding of performance and opportunities for improvement,” Schenk says. “Without that data, you’re kind of shooting in the dark, and you don’t know if you’re making the best choices. So that’s super helpful for us in our hospitals, and we will continue to develop that for our non-hospital sites.” 

In the first two quarters of 2025, we plan to expand the WE ACT Scorecard to capture data across all our non-acute clinical sites, including imaging centers, clinics and ambulatory centers. In the future, these advanced analytics will drive data-informed decisions, improving our understanding and performance. 

Assessing resilience

Our commitment to resilience (We REACH) remains strong, helping us continue to serve as we have for 170 years, even in the face of extreme weather events and ongoing changes resulting from our planetary crisis.

“Resilience is a really important aspect of our environmental stewardship commitment because that’s how we look ahead and help support and protect,” Schenk says. “That’s also a real opportunity for making sure that we’re using our principle and core value of justice.”

Our short-term resilience work includes establishing metrics to assess and enhance resilience against climate-related impacts. In the long term, we will use analytics to identify vulnerabilities, work with community partners and implement strategies to bolster resilience.

“If we’re aware that there are neighborhoods or communities that are more at risk for long-term smoke impacts, for instance, we can help advocate for more safety,” Schenk says. “If we’re aware that some communities are more exposed to heat without protection, an urban tree canopy, air conditioning or respite places, we can help through advocacy and through our partnerships with other community organizations.”

Future assessments may include things like building readiness. “Can our facilities handle 116°?” Schenk asks. “Do we have what we need in terms of heavy and longer-term smoke exposures? Do our caregivers have what they need when they must evacuate from their homes?”

Asking questions related to procurement

In the new year, we continue to integrate environmental stewardship criteria into our procurement processes to help promote environmentally preferred sourcing. 

“We have a lot of opportunity with what we purchase,” Schenk says. “That’s often the biggest contributor to an organization’s greenhouse gases and so we’re working on that in a variety of ways. We have a team in our supply chain who is committed to environmental stewardship and DEI issues.”

Providence fosters partnerships with some of its largest vendors to understand their environmental stewardship goals and commitments better.

“We are partnering with our suppliers to move in the same direction,” Schenk says. “It’s important that they understand our goals. They want to help us meet those, so there’s a lot of movement.” 

A big challenge is the health care industry’s reliance on a complex global supply chain, resulting in little transparency about products.  

“We are working with multiple national groups on understanding and driving change through our purchasing,” Schenk says. “We work with our caregivers to understand what they can do to select products that are more durable and more reusable. And I think there’s a real openness and willingness to try and figure this out because this is not only a health care challenge, but also for all of us with our consumption of materials and resources.”

Looking ahead: 2025-2030

As we ring in the new year, we acknowledge last year’s environmental stewardship achievements and our vision for this year and the future.

“Our planetary crisis is enormous, and it touches everything,” she says. “I do not expect us at Providence to solve our global crisis. I think this is an ongoing, long-term issue that will continue to get worse because we have not reached peak emissions globally yet. And it’s going to take all sorts of brilliant solutions for us to get through it. But I find it super exciting to be part of these solutions. It’s relieving.”

While Schenk doesn’t expect to see our climate crisis solved in the near term, she does expect to see it transformed. 

“I expect to see solutions all the way along,” she says. “Every single day it matters that we’re working towards solutions because that helps head off further harm and suffering. The solutions we are finding today both challenge us and teach us how we can do things differently. That is discovery and innovation. It’s really exciting to be able to do that in a complex organization at scale.” 

So we march on, dedicated to collaboration, investment and innovation and understanding the importance of continued progress. 

“Our people are well prepared, moving forward together and actually seeing results,” Schenk says.

Join us in our environmental stewardship progress and discoveries so that we can all learn how to care for our common home and the health of our communities. Learn more about our Providence Center for Environmental Stewardship. Read our related Environmental Stewardship blogs. Read our Climate Action Plan. Stay informed and involved in environmental stewardship efforts within your communities to share in our vision of Health for a Better World.

Contributing caregiver

Beth Schenk, Ph.D., RN, FAAN, is the Chief Environmental Stewardship Officer for Providence.

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Related resources

Climate justice is a health issue

Curbing the impacts of climate on health

Partnering for good: How collaboration can reduce emissions

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