Singapore’s healthcare industry moving  to measure carbon emissions

A LOCAL research institute is working on the first assessment of carbon emissions in Singapore’s healthcare industry. This includes hospitals, polyclinics and primary care clinics.

The study will gather and analyse healthcare operators’ expenditure data – which can include energy bills, transport costs and the usage of medical instruments – as a proxy to estimate their carbon emissions.

“You know the carbon footprint of a scalpel and of an anaesthetic gas; and you can look at how much of that a hospital consumed, and figure out what the underlying emissions were,” said Professor Nick Watts, director of the National University of Singapore’s Centre for Sustainable Medicine (CoSM).