Now That’s What I Call Sustainability: 2025
Written By Anthea Gabot and Jack Brown
Introduction
When you turn on the news, you will likely come across titles such as “The Earth’s Climate is further out of balance than any time in recorded history”1 or “Temperature exceeds 19C on the warmest day so far for parts of the UK”2.
With stories like these, it’s easy to feel a sense of hopelessness and despair. That feeling only gets worse when it’s accompanied with animals suffering due to these consequences.
These articles tend to generate plenty of views and engagement, but it does not help bring people together or inspire meaningful action. When trying to motivate a patient, the first thing they teach us is to encourage change rather than shame, so why can’t this be the same?
Reporting mainly negative climate news creates a sense of helplessness. Therefore, journalism has inadvertently discouraged people from doing small things to become more sustainable as they feel like they will have no impact.
However, journalism and reporting does not have to be all doom and gloom.
In fact, some of the medics at UCL have proved this with the addition of the UCLMS Planetary Health Report Card (PHRC).3 This Report Card offers constructive criticism to the university and its faculty, identifying areas where the medical school can become more sustainable while also highlighting the progress already being made.
The PHRC
The PHRC has been done at UCL since 2021. The report card shows results based on five sectors: Curriculum, Research, Community Outreach and Advocacy, Student-Led Initiatives and Campus Sustainability.4 It weighs these accordingly and gives you an overall grade out of 100 and a numerical scoring grade. The PHRC team then places your grades against other UK universities.
UCLMS and the PHRC
If you would like to see the full breakdown of our results, please go to the Planetary Health Report Card.3 The rest of this article will summarise the brilliant job UCL Medical School did according to their PHRC, as well as areas that they could improve upon.
Our score in our previous year, 2024-2025, was 88.70%, with an overall grade of an A; with A+ being the highest score. The exact grade of each metric is shown [above, below, left, right]. Our combined results have improved year-on-year, leading us to be the 4th best in the UK, and even winning our Varsity of Sustainability against GKT!
What we did well?
UCLMS scored the highest grade possible. Notably, two areas were highlighted for their success. Firstly, UCL has a written and approved plan to go Net Zero by 2030.
Secondly, the UCL Grand Challenge of the Climate Crisis, which is an initiative to leverage interdisciplinary research expertise to research and innovate practical solutions to improve UCL’s sustainability, with the funds for 2026-2027 reaching £25,000 to £40,000. If you are interested in research, sustainability is a real gap in the market, so consider applying for the Grand Challenge funding!
What do we need to improve?
Although the results are overall positive, there are still a few areas to improve upon, which the PHRC team is fully aware of.
Our current score for the Curriculum section of the PHRC is B; this is based on how well UCLMS implements climate change concepts into our learning. Spanning from the beginning of first year to wherever you are in your medical school career, it’s time to think about the sustainability lectures you have had. What areas do you think were missing, and has there really been enough coverage?
In the report, there were some main topics with reduced coverage in our curriculum.
- There is limited teaching on the cardiovascular complications of climate change.
From food insecurity to air pollution, climate change amplifies the environmental stressors that may directly impact cardiovascular health.
- The unfair impact that climate change has on marginalized populations, including, but not limited to, women, communities of colour, children and the homeless.
The effects of widening inequalities can even be found on our doorstep, with marginalized populations in London experiencing the effects of gentrification and pollution more so than others - even the government is admitting it!5 Even worse, lower income populations contribute the least to climate change but are impacted the most.6
- The curriculum fails to address the reproductive health effects of industry-related environments.
Factories, agricultural chemicals and air pollution all contribute to the deteriorating health of communities, to the extent that the International Federation of Gynaecologists and Obstetricians published a paper encouraging the creation of policies to prevent toxic chemicals from entering the environment which can negatively affect human reproduction.7
All of these points are definitively important to medicine, and some may argue that they’re important enough to be put on the core conditions list.
Other than the lectures in the curriculum, last year there was no Student Selected Component on sustainability for Year 1 medical students, nor Year 6 electives catering towards students interested in sustainability. If we cannot show how interesting and pertinent this subject topic is throughout medical school, it is very unlikely people will be motivated to independently learn more about sustainability.
Limitations
Before we look at the future, we also need to understand the limitations of the PHRC. Although it is a far better source than TikTok or Instagram for sustainability reporting, it does have a few drawbacks.
Primarily, what do the results actually mean? Does getting an A* automatically mean that we are perfect? No, of course not! The grade is relative, and even though A* is a great achievement, it is only the starting point. The extent to which sustainability is covered in the curriculum is subjective; starting from a few lines on one slide. And you can imagine that even the three proposed subjects above could take up a whole lecture.
Secondly, the PHRC is only concerned with how the medical school operates, rather than how individuals lead their lives. It isn’t concerned with how many lights you use or how long you leave the water tap running, but we need to continue doing our part to help improve sustainability.
The future
Looking into the future, the medical school and student body can still make a few changes.
On an organisational level, integrating more sustainability lectures into the curriculum will help plug into our inherent frequency bias. When someone keeps mentioning something to you, you are more likely to appreciate it and realize its significance in your life. In addition, increasing the funding for sustainability is an essential part of primary prevention - investing in sustainability will save us in costs down the line.
On a student level, the easiest way is giving advice to the university. Even though people only scan QR codes when they are for attendance, the feedback forms are a way of sharing new ideas with lecturers to promote certain areas of sustainability.
Furthermore, students get involved with sustainability initiatives to try and improve UCL, leaving the university better than when you first arrived and with a bonus of potentially snagging a few points for a Specialty portfolio. You can even begin your own initiative - there are endless ways to make every department more sustainable. If you want a framework, I recommend looking at SusQI.8
Lastly, and more controversially, students should encourage changes at home, as well as at university. As mentioned previously, one limitation of PHRC is that it is only concerned with sustainability at university. But most of us spend more time at home than at university (I hope), so by implementing the sustainable changes seen at university back at home, we could make even more of an impact! My recommendation to get started would be to look at the 7 Acts by RealZero, a nonprofit sustainability company. The 7 Acts explains the best and simplest ways to live sustainably.
Conclusion
Ultimately, we hope to encourage you to think about sustainability more often and in a positive light, especially when we can see how much has already been achieved and how easy it can be for you and the medical school to improve. I hope this article has highlighted what UCL has done well, and we hope you will stick around for the 2025-2026 report in the next RUMS Review.
Acknowledgements
We would like to acknowledge all teams that have done the PHRC, particularly the 2024-2025 team: Trizzha Feliciano, Ameera Milhan, Elena Kehtarnavaz, Shifa Ali and Dr Eleanor Nash (UKPHRC).
Read the rest of the edition here.
References:
1. Poynting M. UN issues new climate warning as El Niño looms. BBC News [Internet]. 2026 Mar 23; Available from: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c203rdxkezwo
2. Bett D. UK weather: Temperatures exceed 19C in warmest day of year so far [Internet]. BBC Weather. 2026 [cited 2026 Apr 5]. Available from: https://www.bbc.co.uk/weather/articles/cpqww7l55rwo
3. United Kingdom - PHRC [Internet]. PHRC. 2025. Available from: https://phreportcard.org/united-kingdom/
4. Metrics - PHRC [Internet]. PHRC. 2024. Available from: https://phreportcard.org/metrics/
5. Air Pollution and Inequalities in London - update 2023 | London City Hall [Internet]. www.london.gov.uk. 2023. Available from: https://www.london.gov.uk/programmes-strategies/environment-and-climate-change/environment-and-climate-change-publications/air-pollution-and-inequalities-london-update-2023
6. Schöngart S, Nicholls Z, Hoffmann R, Pelz S, Schleussner CF. High-income groups disproportionately contribute to climate extremes worldwide. Nature Climate Change [Internet]. 2025 May 7;15:1–7. Available from: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-025-02325-x
7. Di Renzo GC, Conry JA, Blake J, DeFrancesco MS, DeNicola N, Martin JN, et al. International Federation of Gynecology and Obstetrics opinion on reproductive health impacts of exposure to toxic environmental chemicals. International Journal of Gynecology & Obstetrics. 2015 Oct 1;131(3):219–25.
8. Home | Sustainable Quality Improvement [Internet]. Centre for Sustainab. Available from: https://www.susqi.org