It is with great pleasure that Providence Health Care (PHC) presents our twelfth annual Climate Change Accountability Report (CCAR) for 2021. For twelve consecutive years, Providence has been proud to be carbon neutral, through our purchasing of carbon offsets.
As an organization driven by innovation and social justice, we believe that our role as health care providers goes beyond caring for individuals and to caring for the environment, too.
Stewardship is one of our key organizational values and throughout our long history of providing compassionate and innovative care, teaching and research, we have been responsible and accountable stewards. For us, that includes taking personal responsibility for the carbon footprint produced by our operations and facilities.
In 2021, Providence had a carbon footprint of 11,838 tons of carbon dioxide equivalent (tCO2e), which was offset at a total cost of $295,950. This represents a 2.7% per cent increase in carbon emissions relative to the 2007 baseline year.
In 2021, Providence reached substantial completion of several energy efficiency and GHG reduction projects at our core sites such as Mount Saint Joseph Hospital, Holy Family Hospital, St. Vincent’s: Langara, St. Vincent’s: Brock Fahrni and Youville Residence which collectively received an incentive of $2,575,077 from FortisBC in recognition of the significant carbon reduction achieved. It is worth highlighting the project at Brock Fahrni which added cooling and reduced carbon emissions by 80%. Also, Langara project utilized Carbon Neutral Capital Program funding and took advantage of a $365,388 incentive from FortisBC, thus minimized the investment required by Providence.
PHC’s Energy Manager played a key role in initiation of a new project on waste-to-energy in partnership with UBC. This project will develop a new innovative technology for handling our food and organic wastes in our health facilities and convert those waste to useful energy and soil amendments. Thus, it can give us an opportunity to move towards a zero food waste health care.
