Environmental footprinting in health care: a primer.

The article "Environmental footprinting in health care: a primer" published in the Medical Journal of Australia discusses the environmental impacts of health care systems, which contribute to 4-5% of global greenhouse gas emissions. The article introduces environmental footprinting techniques to uncover these impacts, focusing on GHG emissions and supply chains. It explains the distinction between direct and indirect impacts, scopes of emissions accounting, and environmental footprinting methods such as life cycle assessment (LCA) and environmentally extended input-output analysis (EE-IOA). The article emphasizes the importance of considering environmental sustainability in health care decision-making and advocates for improving environmental footprinting literacy, incorporating it into existing frameworks, investing in infrastructure, increasing transparency, and learning from other successful initiatives. [Extracted from the article]