Glimmers of hope and rage

Activists, politicians, investors

Ambitious targets

Video Player is loading.

Current Time 0:00

Duration 0:19

Loaded: 58.87%

Stream Type LIVE

Remaining Time 0:19

Science

Fighting the climate crisis

The climate change debate has taken a breather during the coronavirus crisis. But the topic should soon reappear in the limelight as the world needs urgent action to keep greenhouse gas emissions under control and avoid a dangerous warming of the planet. Novartis has initialed a series of climate actions aimed at becoming carbon-, plastic- and water-neutral over the next few years.

Text by Goran Mijuk, illustrations by Anna Miracle and David Acevedo (DAQ)

Personal commitment
As part of its environmental strategy, Novartis aims to be carbon-neutral by 2025 and reach plastic and water neutrality by 2030. While the company is pursuing large energy deals to reach this goal and is maintaining massive carbon sinks, the personal commitment of its associates is equally important. Back in 2012, a small group of climate activists in Basel created the Green Team, which has since triggered a massive grassroots movement across the company. Among others, the team has installed carpooling schemes to help associates save CO2 when commuting to work.

Table of contents

Glimmers of hope and rage

Activists, politicians, investors

Ambitious targets

Before SARS-CoV-2 struck the world, talk of climate change was on everyone’s lips. Not a day would pass without Greta Thunberg posting an Instagram message, giving an interview, holding a mass rally or lambasting politicians and businesspeople for destroying the planet in their search for profits.

Creating a social and political tsunami that transformed large swaths of the geopolitical landscape, her idiosyncratic style, which inspired millions to fight for a greener and cleaner future, was abruptly frozen in March 2020 when the world was faced with a more imminent enemy.

By April 2020, press articles on climate change had halved according to news database provider Factiva. The use of the search term “climate change” on Google dropped from its peak in September 2019 to less than half that value in late April. Greta Thunberg’s rare public sightings, meanwhile, were linked to a suspected COVID-19 infection.

From plane to ship
Air freight has been the preferred means of transport in the pharmaceuticals industry for a long time. But given the high CO2 output, companies are moving increasingly to ships in order to convey goods over long distances. One of the largest projects Novartis has been pursuing over the last few years is to transfer medical treatments from its various European production sites to the port of Antwerp in Belgium and ship medicines from there to the rest of the world.

Glimmers of hope and rage

Deplorable as this was, climate change topics still made some headlines. A few days into the crisis, footage appeared on social media that showed mud-free canals in Venice, raising hopes that the lockdown, which was in place in most of Europe, Asia and the United States at the time, would at least help reduce pollution.

Likewise, photos from car-free public spaces, empty highways, grounded airplanes and seemingly deserted cities, as well as the steep decline of oil prices, suggested that nature would benefit from the pandemic.

While the coronavirus crisis may keep a lid on the global economy for years to come, the temporary shutdown of businesses across the globe in fact helped curb carbon emissions by some 8 percent, according to a study published in Nature Climate Change. And the International Energy Agency likewise expects greenhouse-gas emissions to drop substantially in 2020 compared with 2019 levels.

Economic and health consequences

Yet, many fear that, despite this temporary decline – in the United States renewables took over coal as a key energy provider during the crisis – pollution and greenhouse gas emissions will quickly rise again if businesses fail to take appropriate actions.

The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, for example, highlighted the danger of underestimating the risk of climate change and likened it to the erratic response to COVID-19.

“In December, many people just dismissed the first reports of the coronavirus from Wuhan because it was happening far away,” said the institute’s chief economist Beata Javorcik. “But, before we knew it, it became our problem. Many people don’t see [climate change] happening, but that doesn’t mean it’s not happening,” Javorcik said.

While the economic costs of climate change will go into the trillions of US dollars, the human toll will be no less catastrophic. According to the World Health Organization, climate change could kill around 250 000 people ever year due to malnutrition, malaria, diarrhea and heat stress.

“The long-term impact of climate change on population health is anticipated to be determined by an interplay of factors,” says Jonathan Spector, Head of Global Health at the Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research. “Some factors will result directly from temperature increases, such as changes in the breeding habitats of mosquito vectors that contribute to various infectious diseases. Other factors will be indirectly caused by climate change. Increased exposure to environmental pollutants, for example, could exacerbate chronic pulmonary diseases and also potentially lead to more cancers.”

Novartis has not only upped its efforts to develop new antimalarial treatments in the past few years. The Novartis Institute for Tropical Diseases, headquartered in Emeryville near San Francisco, is also working on a potential treatment for Dengue, another infectious disease that may be influenced by global temperature fluctuations. On top of that, the company has a large arsenal of therapies directed to chronic disease management, which are globally on the rise due in part to societal ageing and climate change.

No plastics
Medicines need to be packaged safely. While this is obvious, the fact that plastic is one of the most widely used material to safeguard the integrity of medicines has posed a challenge to engineers who are now looking for new packaging material and techniques to limit the use of fossil-derived PVC. Engineering smart cartons and using biodegradable plastic are some of the many ways Novartis is trying to cut its PVC use and become plastic-neutral by 2030.

Activists, politicians, investors

But to avoid unnecessary deaths, more needs to be done. “As our response to COVID-19 must be global, science-based, collaborative and holistic, so must we create a world that is also able to efficiently and effectively address the next pandemic and other global crises like the climate emergency,” Jennifer Morgan, Executive Director of Greenpeace International, urged in an article published by the World Economic Forum on its COVID-19 Action Platform.

Other environmentalist groups pressed politicians to direct economic help towards supporting the environment in order to create a more sustainable and less CO2-dependent economy, while economic analysts and investors have also joined the chorus of climate supporters.

Consultancy McKinsey, for example, which estimated that global aid programs linked to COVID-19 have reached some 10 trillion US dollars, suggested that part of these funds should be used to facilitate green investments.

That economists and investors are concerned with climate risk is not a novelty. What is new, though, is the vehemence with which investors are pushing the subject. The most prominent among those is Larry Fink, Chief Executive Officer of BlackRock, the world’s largest investment company.

In January 2020, in his annual letter to CEOs, Fink not only highlighted that “climate change has become a defining factor in companies’ long-term prospects” but that he believes “we are on the edge of a fundamental reshaping of finance,” which is set to trigger a reallocation of capital.

Clean chemistry
Breakthroughs in chemistry were key drivers of the industrial revolution. But many of chemistry’s insights have since proven to be detrimental to the environment and the climate. A research group at Novartis is working on new methods in an attempt to reduce the use of fossil-derived chemicals and focus on chemical reactions that can be performed in water and with the help of easily degradable soaps or specially designed enzymes.

Ambitious targets

Novartis, which has been an early supporter of corporate climate action – the company was among the first signatories of the Global Compact, a UN initiative created at the turn of the millennium to spur sustainability – is fully aware of these risks and has accelerated its environmental efforts over the past few years.

Among the projects Novartis pursued early on were the launch of carbon sinks, the introduction of an internal carbon price, high environmental building and production standards, as well as the launch of global, volunteering-driven teams that pursued myriad projects to make the company greener.

By 2016, Novartis also installed a Head of Climate, a position designed to take a more holistic view of the climate challenges and work on large-scale programs to save energy and reduce pollution, including the setup of large renewable energy contracts.

In this vein, the company also set itself a series of ambitious environmental targets in 2018 with the goal to meet high societal expectations and help governments around the world reach their climate goals. Among other ambitions, Novartis envisages becoming carbon-neutral in its own operations by 2025 and across its supply chain by 2030, and achieving plastic and water-neutrality by 2030.

Standing together

Chief Executive Vas Narasimhan, who started early on in his tenure to push for high environmental targets, is convinced that holistic action will make a difference. During the height of the coronavirus crisis, Narasimhan wrote in a blog dedicated to COVID-19 that the public energy assembled to reign in the virus could have a lasting effect if directed to fight climate change. “Imagine if we brought this collective power to the challenges of climate change or extreme poverty or global health. We could completely reimagine the future of our planet.”

Soon after the publication of the blog, Novartis was among more than 300 companies in Switzerland asking the Council of States to introduce more impactful environmental laws and also joined the Science Based Targets initiative in its call to governments to join businesses in taking environmental action.

“I’m so proud to be part of the global Novartis team working on these critical issues, and proud that we’ve got a CEO who is willing to speak out publicly and lead the way on the defining issue of our generation,” James Goudreau, Novartis Head of Climate, wrote on LinkedIn after Novartis joined the initiative.

In 2019, Goudreau and his team were able to cut carbon emission by 80 000 tons compared to the levels of 2016. And while the coronavirus crisis may stall some of the big projects, Goudreau is convinced that Novartis will stay on course and help its stakeholders to prosper. “Investments in efficiency, decarbonized energy and transportation and then investments in resilient infrastructure will be critical for global communities to continue to thrive.”

(This version updates a previous item published on September 22, 2020, reflecting the new ESG goals of Novartis.)

Fighting the climate crisis

Your privacy is important for us.

Strictly necessary cookies

Performance cookies

Functional cookies

Targeting cookies