Impact & KPIs

Carbon footprint

It has been reported that the pharmaceutical industry is among the highest producers of greenhouse gas emissions. Carbon footprinting can be used to identify which elements of DCTs have the greatest impact on greenhouse gas emissions and can support future decision making in Europe to reduce carbon emissions in clinical trials. However, there are relatively few publications quantifying greenhouse gas emissions of clinical trials at present, or DCTs specifically.

Recommendations

Embed carbon footprinting in DCTs from the beginning

From inception, embed carbon footprinting in DCTs. This includes prospectively capturing carbon emissions data on all aspects of the clinical trial. Understanding which elements contribute to the carbon footprint of a trial can help investigators identify opportunities to reduce trial carbon footprints. Planning to collect this data prospectively allows more accurate assessment of carbon footprint than trying to do this retrospectively.

Further develop tools for carbon footprinting of DCTs

We should continue to improve and develop tools that can measure the carbon footprint of DCTs with as much accuracy as possible.

How Trials@Home reached these recommendations

We investigated the carbon footprint of RADIAL using the Greener Trials CiCT tool, “Enabling lower carbon clinical trials: A method to quantify the carbon footprint of clinical trials to inform future lower carbon clinical trial design.” Using this tool gave many insights including the distribution of carbon footprint between different elements of the trial logistics, with the majority arising from clinical trials unit activities. Insights were also obtained about how the current tool could be improved for use when carbon footprinting DCTs.