Medical trainees are seeing climate-related health impacts at the bedside, but most residency programs still don't formally teach planetary health. A new opinion piece argues the ACGME must mandate climate and health competencies across all GME programs — not leave it to individual passion projects. Emergency medicine is already leading the way, with new requirements taking effect in 2028.
The WHO has called climate change the single greatest threat to global health in the 21st century, yet graduate medical education (GME) in the U.S. has been slow to respond. A new opinion piece by four medical trainees argues it's time to stop treating planetary health as an elective and start embedding it into the core of residency training — through case-based learning, quality improvement projects, and longitudinal curricula tied to existing competency frameworks.
The gap is real: a needs assessment of internal medicine residents found a mean confidence score of just 2.2 out of 5 on environmental health topics. The authors point to Emergency Medicine as a model — the ACGME has already approved new program requirements (effective July 1, 2028) mandating that EM residents demonstrate competence in recognizing and managing climate-related health impacts.
Key Takeaways:
Why it matters: Without standardized training, climate-informed care will remain uneven and inequitable. As extreme weather events, heat illness, and climate-sensitive diseases become more common, physicians who aren't trained to recognize and address these conditions will be less equipped to protect their patients.
