Tracking health care’s global environmental impact is a step toward more sustainable health systems

The Health-Care Sector and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)

The health-care sector is threatened by the increasing impacts of global environmental change, but is also a significant contributor to the problem. Recent estimates suggest health care is responsible for between two and five per cent of global greenhouse gas, sulphur dioxide, nitrogen oxide and particulate matter emissions.

In 2020, England’s National Health Service became the first health system in the world to set a target of achieving net zero carbon dioxide emissions. Since then, a further 21 countries have committed to achieving net-zero health system emissions, and 58 nations have pledged to make their health systems sustainable and low-carbon.

Progress on this front will ultimately depend on two things:

the rapid quantification of health care’s environmental impacts at all levels of service provision and across all geographic regions, and
promptly providing this data to relevant stakeholders, including health care policymakers, managers, procurement teams, administrators, and health care workers themselves.

An Innovative Open-Access Platform: HealthcareLCA

While researchers around the world are working hard to assess the environmental impacts of different aspects of health care, the HealthcareLCA database serves as an up-to-date repository for this work, bringing together new and existing assessments into one centralized location.

map showing geographical distribution of research on health care's environmental impact — Collectively, the studies included within the HealthcareLCA database to date have been authored by more than 850 authors from over 350 institutions. This chart shows the geographical distribution of these institutions, with the size of each dot corresponding to the number of included studies published by each institution.
HealthcareLCA

The database currently houses more than 4,500 environmental impact values (including, for example, contributions to global warming, ozone depletion, smog formation, and acidification) for nearly 1,500 health care products and activities. These include equipment, pharmaceuticals, investigations, procedures, treatments, services and entire health systems.

Importantly, HealthcareLCA is open-access and “living” in nature, meaning that our online database is freely accessible and continuously updated as new research becomes available.