Meetup 32

Who Carries the Responsibility for Health Care Carbon Reduction?

Policy-makers, doctors, organizations, and academics  who are persuaded that health care decarbonization is an ethical mandate are grappling with ethical and effective implementation. Health care carbon-mitigation strategies (both proposed and potential) can be envisioned at individual, regional (city, state, or council), national, and international levels. While these levels have been studied to different degrees, a comparative analysis of strategies at each of these levels, taking into account bioethical issues such as autonomy, responsibility, and shared decision-making, has not been adequately conducted.

This talk seeks to make clearer what the collective responsibilities are for health care carbon reduction, by undertaking a comparative analysis of the ethical issues of health care carbon reduction across levels from the individual to the international, based on the research of Drs. Cristina Richie and Gabrielle Samuel [1], with commentary by Dr. Anne Zimmerman.

Thursday 24 September 2026, 3PM Geneva Time

• Chair: Sally Davies, writer and editor
• Cristina Richie (cristina.richie@ed.ac.uk)

Cristina Richie

Lecturer of Ethics of Technology at the University of Edinburgh

• Anne Zimmerman (ahz5@columbia.edu)

Anne Zimmerman 

Advisory Board Member, Bioethics 

Editor-in-Chief, Voices in Bioethics 

Founder and Chair, Innovative Bioethics Forum / Modern Bioethics 

Chair, New York City Bar Association Bioethical Issues Committee

• Gabrielle Samuel (gabrielle.samuel@kcl.ac.uk)

Gabrielle Samuel

Lecturer in the Department of Global Health & Social Medicine, Kings College London