MSF works to reduce carbon emissions to help safeguard the health of the most vulnerable

A roadmap to decarbonisation

Teams from Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) are responding to health and humanitarian impacts linked to the changing climate and degrading environment in many locations across the world. Many of these places are in the countries deemed most at risk to the effects of climate change.

MSF OCG presence 2022 – ND-GAIN Country Index
which summarises a country’s vulnerability to climate change and other global challenges in combination with its readiness to improve resilience.

The health emergencies we are already responding to in these locations will increase in scale and severity as the climate crisis accelerates, aggravating humanitarian situations.

A significant proportion of the health problems managed in MSF programmes today are climate-sensitive diseases and most of these are projected to increase over time. The communities in the countries where we work are among the first and hardest hit by the climate and environmental emergency.

Commitment to reduce emissions

As a medical humanitarian organisation, we cannot ignore this situation. On the one hand, we are responding to the health and humanitarian consequences generated or aggravated by carbon emissions. But on the other hand, we are also aware that we are contributing to those emissions when carrying out our activities.

We recognise that we have a clear responsibility to improve our environmental footprint. This is why we committed to mitigating our contributions to the climate crisis by setting a carbon reduction target in December 2021. We have pledged to reduce our emissions by at least 50 per cent compared to 2019 levels by 2030. With this target, we aim to chart a firm trajectory towards decarbonisation, aligning MSF with the goals of the Paris Agreement on climate to limit global warming below two degrees Celsius.

With that ambition, we have joined the nearly 200 humanitarian organisations who have signed the Climate and Environment Charter for Humanitarian Organizations.

As an emergency medical organisation, our priority will always be to provide rapid assistance to people in some of the world’s most remote places. But we must find a way to do this while minimising our environmental footprint.

Our carbon footprint

MSF measured the carbon footprint for our Operational Centre in Geneva and it is estimated at 68,766 tCO2e, calculated for the year 2019. It quantifies the sources of greenhouse gas emissions for which we are accountable, including direct and indirect emissions.

The estimated footprint includes emissions from our headquarters in Geneva and from running our programmes in the countries where Operational Centre Geneva worked in 2019.

You can read our full carbon footprint report

How will we reach this ambitious target? – A roadmap to decarbonisation

We have partnered up with The Climate Action Accelerator  to design a decarbonisation roadmap which is adapted to the reality of our medical humanitarian activities. This roadmap has 32 solutions which constitute the building blocks of a trajectory to help us halve our carbon emissions by 2030 and reduce our impact on local environments.

We will concentrate efforts on implementing solutions that have the biggest impact on carbon reduction :

Key solutions to be implemented. The percentages indicated correspond to the reduction impact of each solution; in other words, how much it will contribute to the 50 per cent reduction in emissions by 2030. Structural effects count for an additional 17 per cent.

The key domains of activities to reduce emissions:

Travel is the largest source of emissions with 28% of total emissions; air travel accounts for approximately 70% of the emissions in this category. We will always need to send personnel to our field projects, but we can make important reductions to our emissions by consolidating our travel policy. We will, for example, review how and where we organise training for our staff members and how we travel for meetings and international fora.

Overall, this means prioritising essential air travel and reducing non-essential air travel. In parallel, we will also optimise the size of our car fleet, its composition, and our car movements to reduce our vehicle fuel consumption by 40 per cent by 2030.  It means using vehicles that emit less when possible and training all MSF drivers to drive in a manner which uses less fuel and has less of an impact on the environment.

Running medical activities requires shipping considerable amounts of medical and non-medical material to different locations around the world. Therefore freight represents 8 per cent of our total footprint. We will work to reduce emissions linked to freight by focusing on transporting less and better. It means favouring sea or road transport over more polluting air transport. It takes longer to ship by sea than by plane, but by planning our orders and consumption better, we can limit air freight to essential contexts and emergency situations. We can also reduce emissions by stockpiling material in strategic parts of the world, nearer to the countries where we run our medical activities.

The emissions linked to the material and equipment we buy to run our medical activities counts for roughly half of our emissions. To reduce these emissions, we will opt to buy material with the lowest carbon footprint and use suppliers who also work to reduce their footprint. This includes analysing the carbon value and life cycle of the products we buy, and including criteria which meets certain environmental standards in our procurement processes.

Medical or paramedical material and equipment constitute a big part of our purchases and therefore also contribute considerably to our emissions. This material is paramount to our medical activities, and we will work to identify and implement solutions that have less of an environmental impact while still keeping their medical effectiveness and impact. We are exploring the feasibility to switch to alternative medical material, such as using recycled plastic items, or anesthetic gas and inhalers with less high warming potential.

MSF runs medical activities in contexts where electricity is often unreliable or not available at all. As a result, we rely on the use of diesel generators to power our hospitals and health centres. To reduce our dependency on fossil fuels, we will work to better control and reduce our energy consumption. We will also work to increase the share of renewable energy we use. For example, we are insulating our pharmacies, switching to more energy efficient cooling systems and installing solar panels in our field projects.

The most important step towards better waste management is to not create waste. We will work to avoid waste and produce less of it by reducing our use of single-use medical and non-medical items. We will instead favour reusable, biodegradable material. In addition, we are putting in place tailor-made waste management plans in the different contexts we work in to identify appropriate waste management streams which favour recycling of materials or safe waste treatment.

To reach our goal, we are making the following commitments:

PROGRAMMES: We will factor in climate and environmental risks and consequences in the analysis and planning of all of our medical humanitarian programmes by 2025.

EMISSIONS: We will reduce our greenhouse gas emissions by 50 per cent of 2019 levels by 2030, without purchasing carbon offsets.

ENERGY: Energy-related carbon emissions will be reduced by around 45 per cent by 2025 and by 70 per cent by 2030 through efforts to limit our consumption and by increasing the share of renewable sources in the energy we use.

SUPPLY CHAIN: By 2025, sustainability will be embedded throughout our supply chain, as a default requirement in our daily planning, procurement and freight decisions and strategy. Our supply chain-related emissions will be reduced by 55 per cent by 2030 compared to 2019.

WASTE: As of 2025, all our projects will have effective waste management plans in place to reduce, recycle and responsibly dispose of waste. The waste we produce will be reduced by 50 per cent by 2030, particularly by limiting the consumption of single-use plastic items.

PEOPLE: We ensure that all our staff members understand the environmental impacts of our humanitarian action and have the opportunity to contribute to the required change. We invest in training our staff, giving them the tools and the means to act.