Other Videos

Leading the Way and Partnering for Change

Human health is inextricably linked to planetary health. As the impacts of climate change are being experienced around the globe, the impacts on global health are becoming more and more clear.

Heat events and increasing emissions are contributing to a rise in respiratory illnesses, such as asthma and lung disease. We are also seeing shifts in the burden of infectious diseases like malaria, with climate change altering where malaria-carrying mosquitos live and how quickly they spread disease. At the same time, the natural ecosystem, an important source for developing new drugs, is heavily affected by the loss of biodiversity.

For Novartis, one of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies, environmental sustainability is closely aligned with its wider purpose to reimagine medicine for people all around the world.  As a company deeply committed to improving global health, it believes tackling climate change is part of that journey. This commitment and passion runs through the highest levels of the company and is reflected in the personal objectives of its senior leaders. 

Based on the simple idea that a genuine concern for human health must extend to the environment in which human beings live, Novartis has been engaged in environmental sustainability programs for over a decade. In response to the growing environmental crisis and the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals, Novartis has adopted a more ambitious stance, embracing much more rapid and comprehensive action to achieve carbon neutrality in its operations by 2025 and to halve the carbon emissions across its supply chain by 2030. In addition, the company aims to achieve water and plastic neutrality by 2030.

 The company is actively pursuing mitigation and adaptation efforts, and heavily investing in renewables. For example, a virtual power purchase agreement with a windfarm in Texas is displacing some 220,000 tons of carbon per year – enough to offset the whole of the company’s operations across the entirety of the United States and Canada.

Furthermore, its forestry initiatives are projected to remove 4.5 million tons of carbon from the atmosphere over the next 30 years. Work is also underway to make the company’s research, development and manufacturing processes more environmentally sustainable, with the ultimate goal of producing medicines that are kinder to the environment.

Novartis has been consistently proactive in engaging its supply chain partners to identify and develop integrated energy strategies including efficiency, renewable energy and credible offsets. Moving forward, the company is working to include sustainability language in every new contract with suppliers.

This type of collaboration is vital in catalysing change and implementing viable long-term solutions that can make the world a cleaner and healthier place to live.