The new policy, on environmental sustainability within pharmacy, expands on a 2016 FIP statement on the importance of reducing the environmental impact of pharmaceuticals and related activities. It makes clear that environmental sustainability includes both mitigation measures, such as reducing pharmaceutical pollution and greenhouse gas emissions, as well as adaptation measures to climate change.
As per FIP, Climate change poses diverse, immediate, and long-term threats to human health. Global health systems have a significant climate impact and medicines account for a significant portion of health system-related GHG emissions in every country. Pharmaceutical pollution causes damage to the environment and ecosystem degradation with downstream impacts on patient care e.g., antimicrobial pollution causing antimicrobial resistance (AMR). Pharmacists, as medicines experts, are well- positioned and ethically responsible to mitigate climate and pollution risks to health throughout the pharmaceutical supply chain and across the spectrum of medication management.
Pharmacy professionals have an ethical responsibility to mitigate climate and pollution risks to health throughout the pharmaceutical supply chain and across the spectrum of medication management. For example, optimised medicines management can mitigate the environmental footprint of health care within clinically appropriate deprescribing. However, the profession must now also address climate adaptation to allow for the sustainability of pharmacy services in rapidly changing environments, said Shellyza Moledina Sajwani, co-chair of FIP’s policy committee that developed the statement.
The document of FIP STATEMENT OF POLICY outlines the roles of pharmacy professionals, their associations, and individual sectors of the profession, listing key actions. Each section is separated into two areas of action: mitigation and adaptation.
For different sectors of the profession pharmacy associations, hospital, community, regulation, industry, procurement, academia, public and population health, military and emergency services the new policy statement makes a number of recommendations under the headings of mitigation and adaptation.
For example, under mitigation, the federation says that regulators should collaborate with other stakeholders to build standardised data collection at national level about greenhouse gas emissions and waste from all sectors of pharmacy while creating objectives to reduce the environmental impact of medicines across their lifecycle. And under adaptation, it says that community pharmacists should update their disaster plans for emergencies and provide regular training or drills on disaster plan procedures relevant to worsening natural disasters and extreme weather events.
