New global healthcare carbon platform launched with major contribution from NUS Medicine
Published: 21 May 2026
The Lancet MedZero team with contributors from across Asia–Pacific, Europe, and North America, including the Centre for Sustainable Medicine at NUS Medicine.
At the 79th World Health Assembly in Geneva, a new global platform designed to help health systems measure and reduce their carbon emissions was officially launched, with researchers from the Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, National University of Singapore (NUS Medicine) playing a key role in its development.
Called the Lancet MedZero, the platform is the first of its kind to provide carbon data across the full spectrum of healthcare products and services, from pharmaceuticals and surgical instruments to diagnostics and care pathways. Developed by an international academic consortium convened by The Lancet, the platform launches with more than 14,000 entries, each with over half a million permutations.
Researchers from the Centre for Sustainable Medicine (CoSM), NUS Medicine, were among the academic partners behind the initiative, contributing carbon analytics, life cycle assessment data, and modelling tools that enable the platform to estimate emissions at scale.
The launch comes as healthcare systems worldwide face growing pressure to decarbonise. If healthcare were a country, it would rank as the world’s fifth largest carbon emitter, producing more emissions than aviation and shipping combined. Yet until now, carbon data has been available for less than one per cent of the products used in healthcare.
Professor Nick Watts, Director of CoSM said, “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.”
The team at CoSM contributed to several core areas of the platform, including generating carbon footprint data for medical products and healthcare services, developing models to estimate emissions from transport, usage and disposal, and ensuring the platform’s outputs are clinically relevant for hospitals, policymakers and frontline healthcare professionals.
Through the Lancet MedZero, healthcare institutions in Singapore will be able to learn more about the carbon impact of products and services, evaluate lower-emission procurement options, and redesign clinical workflows using evidence-based carbon data. One example highlighted by the platform shows how a hospital CEO in Singapore may find that 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.
The launch at the World Health Assembly brought together global healthcare leaders, including 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.
Following the launch, NUS Medicine and CoSM will continue working with healthcare institutions, policymakers and industry partners in Singapore to pilot the platform locally, validate data in Singapore’s healthcare context, and support wider adoption across the sector.
Explore the Lancet MedZero at: https://medzerocarbon.com
