Caring for people and planet: Connecting social care, digital innovation and net zero
Nicola Cooper, Head of Digital Futures, Scottish Care
There is something in the values and practice of social care that sits comfortably alongside environmental thinking and care for the planet.
Perhaps it's because social care is about more than meeting immediate needs. It is concerned with creating the conditions for a good life, what Aristotle called eudaimonia, or human flourishing. Social care attends to our dignity, agency and wellbeing, recognising how these are shaped by our relationships, our communities and the places we call home, as well as our connection to the natural world.
Of course, this doesn't mean social care is inherently environmentally sustainable. The way care is organised and delivered has an environmental footprint, and reducing it is not always straightforward. But I think there is something worth exploring in the relationship between caring for people and caring for the environments in which they live. Both require us to think about wellbeing in the longer term, the resources we depend on and the consequences of the choices we make.
These were some of the thoughts I brought to a workshop hosted by the Digital Health & Care Innovation Centre (DHI) in Glasgow on 14 September, Connecting Digital Health, Care and Net Zero: Co-Designing a Shared Agenda for Innovation.
The workshop formed part of the University of Strathclyde's Research, Knowledge Exchange and Innovation (RKEI) Collaborative Cultures project, funded by the Wellcome Trust. DHI had undertaken a landscape review exploring how digital health and care might contribute to Scotland's net zero ambitions, mapping existing activity and identifying gaps and opportunities. The workshop brought together people from health and social care, housing, academia, government and industry to examine the findings and help shape priorities for future research and innovation.
Social care was relatively absent from the landscape review. While this may reflect gaps in the available evidence, it shouldn't be mistaken for an absence of activity. There's also something worth considering about social care's proximity to people's everyday lives. Through the relationships it builds with people and communities, the sector has opportunities to make environmental considerations more relevant to everyday decisions, particularly when ambitions such as net zero can feel abstract or distant. Yet we don't always have the evidence to understand or describe that wider contribution.
There is certainly activity to build on. In its response to Scotland's draft Circular Economy Strategy, Scottish Care highlighted opportunities to improve the energy efficiency of care buildings, reduce food waste, extend the life of textiles and equipment, and develop more sustainable approaches to transport and procurement.
Some of these changes could reduce operating costs alongside environmental impacts. Others require upfront investment that providers may struggle to make, particularly within existing funding and commissioning arrangements. A care provider might bear the cost of environmentally responsible decisions while some of the longer-term benefits are realised elsewhere. As Scottish Care has argued through its Care Creates work, environmental responsibilities need to be reflected in how care is funded, commissioned and supported.1 Energy infrastructure, transport systems and building standards all influence the choices organisations can make, often with significant and unpredictable costs. These challenges cannot be resolved by providers acting alone, and it's this need to think and work across systems that has stayed with me since attending the World Design Congress in London in September 2025.
Hosted by the Design Council under the theme Design for Planet, the congress explored how design might help us respond to complex environmental challenges. The Design Council's Systemic Design Framework encourages us to look beyond individual products or services and consider the relationships and wider systems in which they operate. Its principles include being people and planet-centred, working in circular and regenerative ways, and collaborating across boundaries.2
This resonates with social care, but also with DHI's approach to bringing different sectors together to explore a shared challenge. By considering the relationships between systems, rather than examining individual services or technologies in isolation, we create opportunities to identify solutions that might otherwise be overlooked.
This is particularly relevant to digital innovation. Technologies can help us coordinate care, support independence and make better use of resources, but they also have environmental costs, from the materials used to manufacture devices to the energy and water consumed by digital infrastructure. We need to consider these impacts alongside the benefits we hope to achieve.
There are also opportunities to think more imaginatively about the infrastructure itself.
At Exmouth Leisure Centre in Devon, technology developed by Deep Green captures heat from computer servers and transfers it into the swimming pool's hot-water system. East Devon District Council initially projected that the installation could reduce the pool's gas requirements by 62%, saving more than £30,000 annually and avoiding 25.8 tonnes of carbon emissions. These figures were estimates rather than independently verified long-term outcomes.3
What interests me about this example is the opportunity to make productive use of energy that would otherwise be wasted. It raises questions about whether similar approaches might have a place in social care, particularly in residential care homes and community facilities with substantial heating and hot-water requirements. The practical and financial considerations would need exploring, but it illustrates what might become possible when we look beyond established sector boundaries.
That brings me back to two important areas of discussion from the DHI workshop: developing a more consistent approach to environmental measurement and creating opportunities for shared learning.
Social care's environmental contribution isn't sufficiently visible, and we need better ways to understand it. Measurement could help us identify where changes make a meaningful difference, challenge assumptions about the benefits of particular technologies and build a stronger case for investment. For providers, however, this needs to be proportionate and useful, rather than another reporting burden.
Shared learning is equally important. Other sectors, including agriculture and aquaculture, have experience of environmental measurement, circular approaches and resource management that could inform our thinking.
The September workshop began a conversation that deserves to continue, with social care more firmly represented. Better evidence, shared learning and collaboration could help us understand what's already happening and identify where investment and innovation might make a difference.
Caring for people and caring for the planet are not separate ambitions. Both depend on the choices we make about how we live, how we use resources and how we design the systems that support us. And both deserve to be part of how we think about the future of care.
References
1. Hedge, K. (2026). Care Creates: A Greener Sector for Healthier Communities and a Stronger Planet. Scottish Care. https://scottishcare.org/news/care-creates-a-greener-sector-for-healthier-communities-and-a-stronger-planet/
2. Design Council (2021). Systemic Design Framework.
3. East Devon District Council (2023). Exmouth swimming pool is heated by a UK first in technology heating solutions. https://eastdevon.gov.uk/news-archive/2023/03/exmouth-swimming-pool-is-heated-by-a-uk-first-in-technology-heating-solutions/
