Health care's response to climate change: a carbon footprint assessment of the NHS in England.

ABSTRACT:

Background

Climate change threatens to undermine the past 50 years of gains in public health. In response, the National Health Service (NHS) in England has been working since 2008 to quantify and reduce its carbon footprint. This Article presents the latest update to its greenhouse gas accounting, identifying interventions for mitigation efforts and describing an approach applicable to other health systems across the world.

Methods

A hybrid model was used to quantify emissions within Scopes 1, 2, and 3 of the Greenhouse Gas Protocol, as well as patient and visitor travel emissions, from 1990 to 2019. This approach complements the broad coverage of top-down economic modelling with the high accuracy of bottom-up data wherever available. Available data were backcasted or foreca

SUBMITTER: Tennison I 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7887664 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature