Los Angeles Wildfires, Climate Change, and Palliative Care: A Call to Action

The wildfires currently devastating southern California are on track to become the most destructive in U.S. history. More than 100,000 residents have evacuated, dozens have died or are missing, and entire communities have burned to the ground. Social and economic consequences are impossible to calculate now but will be severe and long-lasting. The most profoundly affected populations are likely to be those with the least financial, physical, or social reserves: people who are chronically ill, elderly, pregnant, or socioeconomically disadvantaged; children; and Black, Hispanic, Indigenous, Asian, and other people of color.

Although winter is not the peak wildfire season in southern California, these fires have spread rapidly due to severe drought, unusually warm weather and oceans, and high winds, all fueled by ​​human-caused climate change. Scientists expect similar crises—flash floods, extreme storms, heat events, and dangerous air quality due to smoke—to increase in intensity and frequency unless immediate action is taken to mitigate the climate crisis. We’ve seen evidence of this with other recent disasters, like Hurricanes Helene and Milton, tornadoes in the central U.S., and drought affecting over 50% of the contiguous U.S. in 2024.

These fires are another example of what’s become an all-too-familiar lesson: climate change is an urgent and immediate threat to human health. People living with a serious illness, their caregivers, and their medical teams face significant challenges when climate-related disasters disrupt health care systems and informal care networks, including communication breakdown from downed power lines, water contamination, power outages affecting home medical equipment, clinic closures, and broken supply chains.

While the news on climate change can feel overwhelming, we must not overlook an equally important lesson: it’s not too late. The climate crisis is solvable. We can help.

The medical field is rallying to meet this challenge. Leading medical journals like The Lancet, The New England Journal of Medicine, and JAMA have identified climate change as the leading public health crisis of our time. Most major medical societies have taken similar steps, often in partnership with the Medical Society Consortium on Climate & Health. Health care organizations like Kaiser Permanente have committed to substantial reductions in their carbon footprints.

As palliative care clinicians, our unique skills and dedication to caring for patients with serious illness—who are particularly vulnerable to the impacts of the climate crisis—compel us to take an active role in addressing this urgent public health challenge. How can we support our patients and colleagues through and beyond recurrent crises? How can we decrease the environmental footprint of our healthcare systems? How can we build climate resilience into care communities? How can we apply our communication skills to inspire trust and action on climate change?

We aim to explore these topics in a future CAPC blog post. In the meantime, we're sharing some climate change resources for those interested in learning more.

• Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Synthesis Report provides an overview of the state of knowledge on the science of climate change. This report is produced every 6-7 years by the IPCC, an intergovernmental body of the United Nations that won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007.
• National Academy of Medicine’s Grand Challenge on Climate Change, Human Health, and Equity is a multi-year global initiative to improve and protect human health, well-being, and equity by working to transform systems that both contribute to and are impacted by climate change.
• Health Care Without Harm is a leading international organization dedicated to providing resources, knowledge, and inspiration for the health care sector to help reduce its environmental impact
• Practice Greenhealth is the leading sustainable health care organization, delivering environmental solutions to more than 1,700 hospitals and health systems in the United States and Canada.

Our hearts are with those affected by the California fires and the health professionals caring for them. Many of us are wondering how we can help right now. We encourage you to contact colleagues, loved ones, and trusted organizations in southern California to offer whatever support you can, whether financial, emotional, professional, or spiritual.

Edited by Melissa Baron. Clinical review by Andrew Esch, MD, MBA.