Steve Rees, IFHE President. Alberta, Canada
Greetings To All IFHE Members Worldwide!
As I write this update, I look outside and I see a smoky haze over the city in which I live, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. The haze is smoke from wildfires in Alberta, British Columbia, and the Northwest Territories. Canadian wildfire officials say that the 2023 wildfire season is easily the worst ever recorded, with about 15 million hectares of land already burned — and an expectation of “higher-than-normal” activity to continue throughout the late summer and fall.
The image below shows the extent of the wildfires across Canada earlier this summer, some of which caused harmful health conditions to prevail across much of Canada and across the border into the USA.
And it is not only Canada – we also see and hear about horrific wildfires in other parts of the world, including Hawaii, Greece and Australia, where summer hasn’t even begun. This is a message to all of us about the impacts of changing climate conditions and the responsibility we have in healthcare engineering to do whatever we can to reduce harmful emissions.
There have been some amazing sustainability projects successfully completed across the globe as has been promoted and publicised through the IFHE Global Energy Awards (now IFHE Global Carbon Challenge). But we need to continue to share our stories and focus on Climate Action in both de-carbonization of our facilities and building increasing resilience to withstand extreme weather conditions.
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