Major pharmaceutical player AstraZeneca has launched a $1 billion sustainability plan in an ambitious bid to reduce its carbon emissions by 2030.
Sustainability
AstraZeneca’s ‘Ambition Zero Carbon’ strategy brings forward its decarbonisation plans by over a decade and includes plans to utilise renewable energy, and switch to a 100% electric vehicle fleet five years ahead of schedule.
The strategy - which was announced at the World Economic Forum (WEF) Annual Meeting in Davos, Switzerland – will see AstraZeneca commit to a number of initiatives designed to improve its climate impact.
In particular, AstraZeneca will develop next-generation respiratory inhalers with near-zero Global Warming Potential (GWP) propellants. The company is aiming to develop pressurised metered-dose inhalers (pMDI) with a GWP that is 99-99% lower than propellants currently used.
AstraZeneca has recognised that the total emissions from its supply chain partners is significantly larger than its own direct operations. As such, the company will work with its value chain partners to reduce their direct emissions through to 2030. The aim is to identify carbon removal options that will result in more carbon dioxide (CO2) being removed from the atmosphere than added to it. If successful, AstraZeneca will become carbon negative across its entire value chain by 2030.
Another part of the company’s plan is a 50-million tree reforestation initiative that will be started in the next five years. AstraZeneca is partnering with local governments and non-profit group One Tree Planted to plant 50 million trees over the next five years.
Lastly, AstraZeneca’s chief executive officer Pascal Soriot will participate in the inaugural meeting of the Sustainable Markets Council (SMC) to help shape policy and find industry solutions to decarbonise the global economy.
“Climate change is an urgent threat to public health, the environment and the sustainability of the global economy. Since 2015, we have reduced our carbon emissions from operations by almost a third and our water consumption by almost one fifth.
But now is the time to act even faster and redouble our efforts. The commitments AstraZeneca has made today as part of our ‘Ambition Zero Carbon’ strategy will enable us to speed up the reduction of our Company’s impact on climate and inspire collaboration at a global level to effect policy change,” Soriot said.
Alexander Farsan, global lead of Science Based Targets, WWF International and Steering Committee member of the Science Based Targets initiative, said: “We congratulate AstraZeneca for responding to the climate emergency and raising the ambition of their science-based targets, which were already in line with the Paris Agreement’s most ambitious goal – to limit warming to 1.5 degrees. As the impact of climate change is felt by more and more communities across the globe, AstraZeneca’s collaborative approach to scale the impact of a science-based approach across their value chain is exactly what is needed.”