As another year of COVID-19 passes by, I applaud the efforts of the editorial team of the Journal of Paediatrics and Child Health (JPCH) in devoting the November 2021 issue to climate change and child health.1 As an anaesthetist and ICU physician, I found Skowno and Weatherall’s article2 most pertinent; please, no desflurane or laughing gas (N2O) anymore from any anaesthetists! Calls to greater sustainability action within the health-care system by Kiang and Behne3 begin the march for the greater paediatric community. Quilty and Jupurrurla give insight into shared Indigenous/non-Indigenous stories about climate change.4 Skinner’s photograph of plastic detritus from one child’s hospital lunch5 is a metaphor for This Civilisation is Finished.6 We must guide civilisation safely through the bottleneck of climate change and species mass extinction, driven by the twin challenges of over-consumption and over-population.
Yet guiding this sustainability journey requires enlightenment about our individual and communal carbon footprints from health care.7, 8 As an outsider to paediatrics, but someone immersed in hospital sustainability, I would like to comment about grappling with home and work carbon hotspots, and reference the work of Doctors for the Environment Australia (DEA),9 and the Climate and Health Alliance.10 Brace yourselves; some efforts are controversial, but should not be in 2022. This is not rocket science, but changing human behaviour is challenging.