Measuring a practice's carbon footprint and setting a target
A medical writer's work adds to the healthcare industry's carbon footprint, and a practice can put its own number on that share and set a target for reducing it, although in 2023 the methods for doing so were not yet standardised. What to change once the number is known is in cutting the footprint of your own working practice, the definitions of a footprint and its scopes in how a footprint is defined and measured.
Where medical writing sits in the healthcare footprint
Medical writing does not appear among the procedures and treatments in the table of healthcare's carbon footprint that the sector's share of global emissions describes, though it still adds to the industry's footprint.
A rough figure for a writer's own share comes from a speaker at an EMWA webinar of October 2020 that introduced sustainability in the healthcare industry. Scaling the revenue-based emissions figures in emissions against revenue down to a medical writer with an assumed annual revenue of 100,000 US dollars gives about two to seven tonnes of carbon dioxide from professional activity, though the transcript does not say which of those figures the scaling started from. Writers' arrangements differ, from employment in larger or smaller corporations to freelancing, and the figure is offered only to put the scale in perspective. The webinar's recording had no supplied captions, so its transcript was generated locally and quality-checked programmatically rather than proofread, and its figures and occasional clauses are approximate.
By October 2020 the #GreenMedComms initiative had investigated where the medical communications industry has an environmental impact and named three key areas: travel, print and production, and people in the workplace. A work group of EMWA's special interest group was then running a parallel exercise, in which one member wrote down all her activities to calculate the carbon they produced, with the aim of publishing the calculation in the association's journal.
A 2024 view of who is responsible comes from a researcher on the carbon footprint of the pharmaceutical supply chain, speaking at EMWA's expert seminar on sustainability in healthcare. Responsibility for reducing the supply chain's environmental impact is spread across many stakeholders, and medical writers are named among them, alongside the pharmaceutical companies, their active-ingredient and energy suppliers and, downstream, the health systems, prescribers, pharmacies and patients. The spread shares the load, but it can sometimes make the different agendas harder to bring together. Mitigating the impact requires action across the whole pharmaceutical supply chain, medical communications included. The seminar's record is Vimeo's uncorrected automatic captioning, so figures and organisation names in it are approximate.
Measure your own practice's footprint
The reason for a freelance practice to know its own number comes from the editorial of the June 2023 freelancing issue of EMWA's journal Medical Writing. The pharmaceutical industry had made strong commitments to decarbonisation, and as companies strove for carbon neutrality, carbon accounting had become part of day-to-day business, with the footprint of each process, each step and each stakeholder closely scrutinised. Freelance medical writers and communicators, as the industry's business partners, vendors and service providers, would be part of that scrutiny. A carbon footprint is a measure of the greenhouse gas emissions produced by an organisation, activity, event, product or individual, in units of carbon dioxide. The June 2023 issue of Medical Writing (volume 32, number 2, on freelancing) was admitted from an existing Markdown conversion without content repair; its known limitations are broken ligatures, mangled multi-column tables, interleaved page headers and footers, and figure text represented as marked text.
The measurement itself was not settled in 2023. Carbon footprinting was not yet fully standardised: methodologies were still evolving, and calculations and metrics were not completely harmonised. The Greenhouse Gas Protocol gives recommendations for carbon accounting by companies, organisations, cities and countries, but its tools do not always scale down easily to small businesses and the self-employed. Online calculators range from simple to sophisticated and from expensive to free, and because fuel sources and energy policies differ between regions and countries, a calculator validated in the place of residence is best. The editorial suggested four resources for choosing one: a May 2023 blog post from the UK's National Federation of Self Employed & Small Businesses on calculating a small business's carbon footprint; the Carbon Trust, which launched the first carbon footprint label in 2007, and its recommendations for small and medium-sized enterprises; an evaluation of online carbon calculators in the UK by Amit Rastogi and Gareth Williams, cited by the National Association of Local Councils; and a review by Greenly of five calculators with the advantages and drawbacks of each.
In 2011 the US Small Business Administration's green guide for new businesses set out, as a framework for freelances and other small business owners, the steps a small business can take: complying with environmental regulations, developing an environmental management plan, building green, buying green products, adopting energy-efficient practices, reducing, reusing and recycling waste, conserving water, preventing pollution, creating a green marketing strategy, and joining industry partnership and stewardship programmes. The guide linked related articles on subjects from environmental compliance and energy efficiency to green commuting, waste and water. A non-profit research and communication institute's online library of sustainability articles and tip sheets had, in 2011, a section for journalists and media representatives on communicating about global warming and other environmental subjects, which a 2011 journal listing judged the part of most interest to medical communicators. The 2011 AMWA Journal issue (volume 26, number 4) was admitted from an existing Markdown conversion without content repair, in which figure labels can be inlined into prose, cover and contents columns can interleave, and reference URLs can be malformed or truncated.
Set a target and act on it
Practical tips for freelancers in the same June 2023 issue recommend three steps. Calculate the carbon footprint first; the tips point to an online list of calculators. Set an ambitious but realistic target for a stated period, such as a 25% reduction over the next 12 months, and once it is reached revise it lower. Then act, by considering how clients are reducing their own footprints and reflecting that in the business's own practice: prioritise local or regional travel over long-haul flights; look at how the home office or shared workspace is heated, since turning the thermostat down by one or two degrees can make a big difference; and where colleagues or acquaintances share the ambition, set one another challenges to meet the targets. Starting small is acceptable if it is easier, provided the practice stays on the path to reducing emissions.
An editorial by a freelance writer in that issue set out the same plan for her own business. She had been at a loss on reading in the 2022 Lancet Countdown report that the carbon intensity of the global energy system had fallen by less than 1% in the more than 30 years since the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change was established, and that health was "at the mercy of fossil fuels", though the report also saw "emerging glimmers of hope" in leadership in the health sector and in individual engagement. Her response was to try some of the available calculators, establish a baseline for her freelance business and set goals, and she invited readers to share their own results and goals with her.
In EMWA's first estimate of its own footprint, published in June 2023, the face-to-face conference and the flights to it took most of the total. Its authors disclosed their personal footprints alongside it, which a person's own footprint sets out.