Clinical Trial Environmental Impact Project: Reducing the carbon emissions of clinical trials (Pistoia Alliance)

Problem statement

It is estimated that 5% of the total global healthcare system costs are spent on clinical research (Sustainable Markets Initiative, 09 May 2022). On a spend basis, this translates to approximately 100 megatonnes of CO2e emissions per year, which is equivalent to the annual carbon emissions of Belgium.

Clinical trials are a critical element of the development process to ensure medication is safe and effective for humans, but this currently comes at a high cost to the environment; this will exacerbate climate change which is already a significant risk to human health on a global scale.

Decarbonisation of clinical trials will ensure that the negative environmental impact of clinical research is reduced. For decarbonisation, data needs to be available to measure the carbon footprint of clinical trials. The Sustainable Healthcare Coalition (SHC) is leading an industry and academic collaboration to quantify the footprint of clinical trials. In partnership with the SHC, the Pistoia Alliance Clinical Trial Environmental Impact project is developing methodology to measure the carbon emissions from decentralised clinical trials (DCT).

This project will enable the comparison of carbon emissions from standard trials to those of decentralised trials, which will result in the data generation needed to drive decision making to reduce the environmental impact of clinical research.

Project objectives