By: Joris Silon, US Country President, AstraZeneca BioPharmaceuticals Business Unit
The climate-health interconnection
Healthcare and climate change might seem unrelated at first blush, but the two are inextricably linked. As AstraZeneca CEO Pascal Soriot noted in our 2022 Sustainability Report, climate change is, “the greatest public health crisis of our time.”
Natural disasters and extreme temperatures are exacerbating existing health issues like asthma and cardiovascular disease, and causing injuries and fatalities. And infectious diseases such as malaria and dengue fever are increasing, and the most vulnerable populations are being prevented from accessing the basic provision of healthcare.
At AstraZeneca, we believe our future depends on healthy people, society and planet – and that these elements are interconnected. Paradoxically, our sector’s work to research, develop and manufacture life-changing medicines is energy intensive – meaning that in our effort to improve human health, we’re contributing to the emissions that harm the planet’s health. Right now, approximately 5 percent of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions are emitted from the healthcare sector overall, and in the US where I live and work, that total is 8.5 percent.
Taking scalable action today
So how can we help decarbonize the delivery of healthcare? And how can we ensure that healthcare can become more sustainable and resilient? To positively impact not only the health of people and society, but the health of the planet as well, we are infusing sustainability into everything we do. At AstraZeneca, we’re looking at how to embed sustainable approaches right from the lab to the patient.
That starts by running our labs in a sustainable way. At AstraZeneca's US R&D sites in California, Massachusetts and Maryland, we’ve reduced our overall energy usage by more than 7 percent, and reduced our greenhouse gas emissions by over 60 percent, from 2015 to 2022. Recognizing that sustainability is much more than the emissions footprint, we’ve also reduced the amount of waste our US R&D operations have generated by nearly 48 percent over this time period, while increasing the recycling rate to over 70 percent. We’re also embedding sustainability in our product design, and transitioning to an electric vehicle fleet – critical for a sector that has a significant amount of medical representatives on the road.
Critical, too, is how we can rethink the delivery of patient care. By focusing on the secondary prevention, early detection and diagnosis, and optimal treatment of disease, we can treat patients earlier and more effectively – improving patient outcomes as well as reducing the footprint of care and the burden on health systems. The latest digital technologies and innovation can help us do that – we saw this through the Covid-19 pandemic with an increase in remote monitoring and telemedicine.
The power of partnership
What is at the center of all these sustainability enhancements – whether in the lab, manufacturing site or in the clinic – is collaboration with experts in their field. We need to push boundaries, together.
Today, we launched an exciting new partnership with Vanguard Renewables, a crucial milestone in the R&D and manufacturing of our medicines. Importantly, this partnership will contribute towards our science-based target to reduce our ‘Scopes 1 and 2’ emissions (those from our operations and fleet) by 98 percent by 2026, part of our Ambition Zero Carbon program. By 2026, this partnership will enable us to use as much as 650,000 million British thermal units (MMBtu) of renewable natural gas every year across our US sites – an amount equivalent to the energy required to heat more than 17,800 homes annually.
In addition to generating renewable energy for our own operations, this partnership will support rural communities and local and family-owned farms across the US and by capturing and utilizing the methane produced by their operations that would otherwise have ended up in Earth’s atmosphere, this partnership also reduces pollution from the farming sector. In other words, it’s a true sustainability win-win-win.
I’m proud that AstraZeneca is doing its part to shrink the carbon footprint of the healthcare industry and advocate for others to do the same. As United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said, “Our world needs climate action on all fronts – everything, everywhere, all at once.”
To learn more about AstraZeneca’s partnership with Vanguard Renewables, visit our recent press release.