The Lancet MedZero: a single platform for carbon data across every product in healthcare
National University of Singapore, Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine
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The Lancet MedZero team photo
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If healthcare was a country, it would be the fifth largest carbon emitter on the planet – between the European Union and the Russian Federation, with CO2 emissions in the sector higher than all of aviation and shipping combined.
Yet, until today, carbon data has been available for less than 1% of the products a clinician or a health system uses each day.
The Lancet MedZero is built to close that gap. Launching today at the 79th World Health Assembly, the platform (www.medzerocarbon.com) is the first to provide comprehensive carbon analytics across the full spectrum of healthcare, from pharmaceuticals and surgical instruments to chest X-rays and blood tests.
Convened by The Lancet and developed by an international academic consortium, it has been designed by clinicians, for clinicians, with over 14,000 entries at launch.
The platform is built to inform decisions at every level of the health system with the aim of helping hospitals and clinics save money, reduce waste, improve patient care, and tackle climate change. For example:[1]
- A health policymaker in the UK could identify that a simple switch from polluting incineration to recycling would avoid over 311,000 tonnes of CO2e (the equivalent to taking 212,000 British cars off the road), saving 76 million GBP each year as a result.
- A hospital CEO in Singapore, can see transitioning to reusable surgical gowns would reduce CO2e emissions by 4,407 tonnes (equivalent to the annual electricity use of 3,159 HDB households in Singapore), saving around 700,000 SGD annually.
- And national procurement experts across the world can compare logistics alternatives, saving over 3.85 million tonnes of CO2e by shifting to lower-carbon freight options for pharmaceuticals, such as shipping, globally (equivalent to nearly twice the national emissions of Malta).
The platform’s launch at the World Health Assembly brought together the Editor in Chief of The Lancet, the Minister of Health of the Philippines, the International Medical Secretary for Doctors Without Borders, the UK NHS’s Chief Sustainability Officer, and the Permanent Secretary of the Thailand Ministry of Public Health.
“The climate crisis is a health crisis. But climate action depends on credible data.” Dr Richard Horton, Editor-in-Chief of The Lancet, said ahead of the launch, “The Lancet MedZero plans to create a shared global infrastructure of knowledge about the carbon footprint of health systems. Measurement is the foundation of accountability, and accountability is the motivation for action.”
The problem the Lancet MedZero solves
More than 100 countries, covering over half the world’s population, have now committed to tackling climate change through a WHO-led Alliance for Transformative Action on Climate and Health.
Until now, that data has been fragmented and inaccessible. The Lancet MedZero was built to change that.
For their hospitals and health systems to turn those commitments into action, they need transparent and trustworthy data to make evidence-based decisions. A surgeon redesigning a care pathway, a pharmacist restocking a hospital supply, a procurement lead renegotiating supply contracts, and a health minister setting national strategy: all of them need product-level carbon data, quickly and reliably.
A global collaboration built for scale
The Lancet MedZero is a global collaboration of clinicians, engineers, data scientists, economists, and public health professionals working to support healthcare decarbonisation worldwide. Convened by The Lancet, it brings together expertise in healthcare delivery, carbon analytics, and system transformation, with contributors from across Asia-Pacific, Europe, and North America. This diversity reflects a shared commitment to advancing sustainable healthcare across regions.
Academic partners: Health Intervention and Technology Assessment Program (HITAP), Thailand; National Institute for Environmental Studies (NIES), Japan; National University of Singapore; Northeastern University, USA; University of Birmingham, UK; University of Melbourne, Australia
About The Lancet: The Lancet is one of the world’s leading medical journals, published since 1823. It has a long-standing commitment to climate and health, including through the Lancet Countdown, the Lancet Commission on Sustainable Healthcare, and multiple commissions on planetary health, pollution, among others.
NUS Specific Quote
“Singapore’s health system is well-positioned to lead on sustainable healthcare in Asia. The Lancet MedZero gives us the data infrastructure to move from aspiration to action – making it possible for our hospitals and clinicians to make every procurement decision, every care pathway choice, with the climate in mind.”
Professor Nick Watts, Director, Centre for Sustainable Medicine, National University of Singapore (NUS)
How NUS contributes to the platform
The National University of Singapore (NUS), through its Centre for Sustainable Medicine (CoSM), is an academic partner of the Lancet MedZero and contributes to the platform in several concrete ways:
- Carbon analytics and life cycle data: CoSM researchers contribute primary life cycle assessment (LCA) data for medical products and healthcare services, quantifying the carbon impact of everything from how a product is manufactured to how it is used and disposed of in a clinical setting.
- Estimating carbon footprints at scale: CoSM also leads the development of the platform's models for the parts of a product's carbon footprint that are shared across many products - such as how it is shipped, used, and disposed of. This includes building practical methods to estimate the weight of tens of thousands of medical products (since weight drives much of the carbon cost of transport and waste). Together, these methods allow the platform to generate carbon estimates at a scale that would not be possible through manual data collection alone.
- Clinical translation and governance: CoSM provides clinical and technical oversight to ensure the platform’s decision-support tools are meaningful and actionable for frontline clinicians, hospital administrators, and policymakers in Singapore and globally.
How the Lancet MedZero benefits Singapore’s healthcare system
Singapore has committed to achieving net-zero emissions for its healthcare sector by 2050, in alignment with the Singapore Green Plan 2030, and has developed a baseline of its healthcare emissions as a foundation for action. The Lancet MedZero directly supports this ambition by giving Singapore’s health institutions access to verified, product-level carbon data that can inform:
- Public hospital procurement decisions – enabling MOH and cluster hospitals (NUHS, SingHealth, NHG Health) to choose lower-carbon products without compromising clinical quality or cost-effectiveness.
- National sustainability reporting – supporting the MOH in tracking and disclosing scope 3 healthcare emissions as part of Singapore’s international climate commitments.
- Clinical care pathway redesign – giving clinicians at public and private institutions access to evidence that supports lower-carbon, cost-saving alternatives in surgical, pharmaceutical, and diagnostic workflows.
As noted in the press release, a hospital CEO in Singapore can already use the platform to model, for example, how transitioning to reusable surgical gowns would reduce CO2e emissions by 4,407 tonnes and save approximately 700,000 SGD annually – equivalent to the annual electricity consumption of over 3,000 HDB households.
Next steps for Singapore
Following the platform’s launch at the 79th World Health Assembly, NUS will:
- Continue engaging with key institutional stakeholders and users including hospital leadership, MOH representatives, and the healthcare industry, to present the platform and identify priority use cases for local adoption.
- Pilot the platform with the clusters and healthcare institutions to validate the data in Singapore’s clinical and procurement context and generate locally relevant case studies.
- Engage academic and industry partners across Singapore to contribute data, expertise, and funding to sustain and grow the platform.
[1] Carbon analytics, volume, and cost data drawn for each of the three examples from www.medzerocarbon.com and underlying data sources.
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