A UK university has come top of the class for integrating planetary health and environmental sustainability into its pharmacy school.

Keele University’s pharmacy school topped the 2026 Planetary Health Report Card (PHRC) for pharmacy, ahead of 12 other universities – including five other UK pharmacy schools.

The ranking reflects the “ongoing commitment” to planetary health and sustainability “which are among the greatest issues facing health and social care globally”, said Keele’s medicine and health sciences executive dean Professor Christian Mallen.

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“I would like to thank all our students and staff who supported this project which reinforces Keele’s position as world leaders in this area,” he added.

The PHRC was established in 2019 by a group of students at the University of California, San Francisco School of Medicine as an “institutional advocacy tool”.

It functions as a “student-led, metric-based self-assessment tool” to evaluate and improve planetary health engagement in health professional schools around its curriculum, research, community outreach, student-led initiatives and campus sustainability.

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It’s been adapted across 12 health disciplines and now has 212 participating schools across 23 countries.

“These future healthcare leaders have bravely used their voices to champion climate action within their curricula, institutions, and broader communities,” its 2026 report said.

Curriculum improvement

It’s the fourth time a report has been produced by the PHRC for pharmacy, and its lead author Sümeyye Eylül Yılmaz said the pharmacy discipline has improved overall compared to last year.

“Curriculum remains the area with the greatest potential for further development,” she said, with interdisciplinary research receiving the best scores across the 13 pharmacy schools.

Other UK pharmacy schools in the list included University College London in second, the University of Nottingham in seventh, the University of Birmingham in eighth, Aston University at ninth and the university of East Anglia at thirteenth.

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Yilmaz said Aston University is recommending a review of its curriculum to embed environmental sustainability into its existing teaching, in areas such as prescribing decisions, deprescribing, polypharmacy, nutrition and experiences on clinical placements.

The PHRC recommended nine ways to improve the how planetary health is embedded into health education.

It called for students to co-design the curriculum and institutions to provide funding to focus on planetary health and publicly report on its progress.

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The PHRC said it’s “imperative that we hold our institutions accountable for educating health students on planetary health and education for sustainable healthcare”.

It hopes the initiative will generate “research to better understand health impacts and solutions”, embrace “sustainable practices on our campuses and in our hospitals” and will engage with “surrounding communities that are most affected by environmental threats”.

It follows two UK universities being ranked in the top 10 of universities in the world for pharmacy last month.