NHS faces challenge to cut carbon emissions

ICT procurement for the health service in England produces carbon dioxide equivalent to that generated by 27,000 of its patients.
Such procurement produces 320,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide each year, according to data released with Saving Carbon, Improving Health: A Draft Carbon Reduction Strategy for the NHS in England, published on 29 May, 2008.
The draft strategy, which challenges the health service to cut carbon emissions by 60 percent by 2050, says greater use of IT could increase the health service's environmental impact, under a heading of "increased energy intensity of healthcare delivery".
However, it mentions teleconferencing as a way of cutting emissions from travel. Patients' travel produces 1.53m tonnes and health-service business travel produces 740,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide, annually.
ICT procurement makes up just 1.7 percent of the English NHS's total emissions of the main gas responsible for climate change, which totals 18.61 million tonnes — 30 percent of the public sector's emissions, and 3.2 percent of all carbon dioxide generated by England.
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The research was not able to provide the additional emissions from ICT's share of NHS electricity use, which in total produces 2.31 milliion tonnes of carbon dioxide annually, due to a lack of individual metering of equipment. The researchers recommended sub-metering to improve understanding of electricity use.
The strategy is set to lead to greater monitoring of greenhouse gas emissions by the health service, although the efficiency of buildings and the carbon dioxide footprint of pharmaceuticals — the latter being responsible for 4.06 million tonnes of annual emissions &mdsh; are more pressing areas for improvement. All health-service trusts will have a carbon management strategy by 2009, and will produce annual reports on their progress on sustainable development.
The strategy document said climate change was responsible for an estimated 150,000 deaths worldwide in 2000. It is the first work produced by the new NHS Sustainable Development Unit.

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India is a Party to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the objective of the Convention is to achieve stabilization of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system.

To strengthen the developed country commitments under the Convention, the Parties adopted Kyoto Protocol in 1997, which commits developed country Parties to return their emissions of greenhouse gases to an average of approximately 5.2% below 1990 levels over the period 2008-12...

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about CDM

Clean Development Mechanism

The Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) is an arrangement under the Kyoto Protocol allowing industrialised countries with a greenhouse gas reduction commitment (called Annex 1 countries) to invest in projects that reduce emissions in developing countries as an alternative to more expensive emission reductions in their own countries. A crucial feature of an approved CDM carbon project is that it has established that the planned reductions would not occur without the additional incentive provided by emission reductions credits, a concept known as "additionality".

Distribution of CDM emission reductions, by country.
The CDM allows net global greenhouse gas emissions to be reduced at a much lower global cost by financing emissions reduction projects in developing countries where costs are lower than in industrialized countries. However, critics argue that by allowing "business as usual" projects some emission reductions under the CDM are false or exaggerated, and in early 2007 the CDM was accused of paying €4.6 billion for projects that would have cost only €100 million if funded by development agencies (see discussion below).

The CDM is supervised by the CDM Executive Board (CDM EB) and is under the guidance of the Conference of the Parties (COP/MOP) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).

Contents
1 History and Purpose
2 CDM project process
2.1 Outline of the project process
2.2 Establishing additionality
2.3 Establishing a baseline
3 Financial issues
4 Concerns
4.1 Exclusion of forest conservation/avoided deforestation from the CDM
4.2 The risk of false credits
4.3 Excessive payments for emission reductions
5 CDM projects to date
6 References
7 See also
8 External links

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