‘GREEN’ STRATEGIES AND NET ZERO CARBON
which operated from January 2014 until March 2016. She also holds a visiting Professorship at the University of Manchester and Imperial College London. She is a Fellow of both the Royal Academy of Engineering and the Royal Society, where she chairs or serves on a number of standing committees.”
Baroness Brown’s introduction Dame Sue began her presentation by quoting a section from Baroness Brown’s introduction to ‘A Healthcare Engineering Roadmap for Delivering Net Zero’, which she dubbed ‘an absolutely amazing document’. She told attendees: “Baroness Brown said: ‘The NHS has now identified a commitment for emissions control directly – the NHS Carbon Footprint – to Net Zero by 2040, with an ambition to reach 80 per cent by 2028-2032, and it must be vital to the whole of Government, and to every level of Government, that the country moves quickly to Net Zero carbon. Overall, a well-managed transition can be achieved and lives improved. The roadmap identified in your document, if diligently applied, will form a significant part of the required changes as they apply to the NHS and the public sector estate.’”
The speaker said with some irony here: “So, there is no pressure on you guys for you to do you bit. What I hope to show you today is that while the Net Zero challenge shouldn’t be underestimated – either for the healthcare sector, or the nation, that shouldn’t stop us doing our best to try. The real question,” Dame Sue added, is “Is it just challenging, or is it in fact impossible, and what can we do to make it an easier journey?’ But why,” she asked, “should we care about low carbon? It’s because we are warming the planet with greenhouse gas emissions, and as a first world country we have to set an example.” Her next slide showed ‘why’. She explained: “Many say we in the UK are tiny in the overall scheme of things – only contributing about 1 per cent of global carbon emissions, an extremely small contribution to emissions compared with countries like China and the US.”
The UK’s ‘duty’
The ‘rich countries’, she stressed, were responsible for 60 per cent of global emissions, and the UK was ‘not one of them’. However, as a ‘first world’ country, the UK had ‘a duty, along with the others, to lead the way in reducing emissions’. She expanded: “If, as first world countries, we don’t lead, how can we expect the emerging and developing nations across the to do their bit? They are wanting, in the main, ‘first world’ lifestyles, and are energy-hungry That’s what initiated the problem in the first place.”
Dame Sue’s next slide showed that greenhouse gas emissions were ‘not just
20 Health Estate Journal June 2021
also started to highlight just what a challenge lies before us.”
She continued: “Back in May 2019 – not that long go – the Climate Change Committee showed that as far as it was concerned, theoretically and
aspirationally, Net Zero was possible, but only if clear, well-designed policies to reduce emissions were further introduced, and the Committee said that current policy – what was in place in 2019 – was insufficient even for the pre-2019 targets, i.e. the 80 per cent carbon reduction by 2050.”
Baroness Brown says in the introduction to A Healthcare Engineering Roadmap for Delivering Net Zero Carbon: ‘The NHS has now identified a commitment for emissions control directly – the NHS Carbon Footprint – to Net Zero by 2040, with an ambition to reach 80 per cent by 2028-2032, and it must be vital to the whole of Government, and to every level of Government, that the country moves quickly to Net Zero carbon.’
about carbon dioxide’. Other significant contributors, such as methane and NOx, also needed to be considered. Next, she showed a slide that the Climate Change Committee had included in its 2019 publication, Reducing UK emissions 2019. Progress Report to Parliament, which she said had ‘attempted to demonstrate’ how the Net Zero Carbon target could be met. “Even then, however,” explained Dame Sue, “the Committee recognised that a shortfall would have to be met with offsets. That is basically cheating,” she added, “because it is buying your way out of the problem, and paying for somebody else to mitigate your carbon levels, but it
‘A rich depiction of choices’ In the Committee’s latest report, published last year, the CCC had noted that if the policies it recommended were implemented, then it would be possible to decarbonise the UK; the report included ‘a rich depiction of various choices’ that could be implemented. She said: “The Committee’s recommended pathway was for a 78 per cent emissions reduction between 1990 and 2035, in effect bringing forward the UK’s previous 80 per cent position by 15 years – even though its 2019 report had said policies at that time wouldn’t meet the target. So, although, in theory, the blueprint would deliver what was required, there was a massive amount of work that would be required not recognised as much as it could be.” This, Dame Sue said, included the taking up of low carbon solutions, maximising the UK’s low carbon energy supplies, and reducing demand for carbon-intensive activities, ‘a lot of it requiring massive behavioural, as well as engineering, changes’. “But when you read the 2020 CCC report ,” she said, “you think: ‘I can’t see how this is going to be possible without a much greater system-level approach.’”
Dame Sue asked whether achieving Net Zero carbon was ‘just challenging, or in fact impossible?’; she also focused on what the healthcare sector, and wider society and industry, can do ‘to make it an easier journey’.
Chris McAndrew
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©Dame Sue Ion
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