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Natural resources
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What are natural resources at AstraZeneca?
Natural resources, and the benefits that humans receive from nature, are essential to produce our medicines and operate our sites. We are committed to:
- Reducing our impact on the planet through responsible sourcing and efficient, circular use and disposal of natural resources across the value chain
- Protecting and restoring ecosystems to improve health outcomes and tackle environmental drivers of disease, such as water and air quality, through our focus on water stewardship and biodiversity
Our approach
We are committed to reducing our impact on the planet and investing in nature and biodiversity to benefit planetary and societal health. We recognise that adopting circular business approaches and implementing efficient processes to develop and produce our medicines is key to reducing natural resources used in our value chains.
To do this, we are leveraging our experience with lean manufacturing, which includes tools to enhance efficiency and eliminate waste, and embedding recognised best practices from partners such as My Green Lab into our business as usual. These efforts empower employees across our global network to identify and implement ideas that contribute to our environmental targets. Our key targets aim to decouple water use and waste generation from business growth, supported by efficiency projects, partnership, and engagement with suppliers, and designing out waste and pollution in support of water security and minimised environmental impact where we operate.
Moving beyond efficiency within our direct operations, we are working in collaboration with key stakeholders, including our ongoing collaboration with the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) Sweden, to make positive contributions to nature and local communities near our sites while mitigating risks from a changing climate. We are also working to embed emerging best practice into our own operations and across our supply chain, for example using tools and guidance that Science Based Targets for Nature (SBTN) is developing, to set long-term, science-led water and biodiversity targets that are informed by local context by 2025. More details can be found in our position statement on Water stewardship.
Recognising that our supply chains have the potential to impact biodiversity, we have committed to developing a framework to systematically assess biodiversity risks and dependencies across our value chain during 2024. We will build on this knowledge to ensure all agricultural, forestry and marine-derived materials used in our products and research activities are sustainably sourced by 2028. We are also committed to demonstrating key forest risk commodities are free from deforestation and ecosystem conversion by 2025.
More detail can be found in our position statements on Water Stewardship (above) and Biodiversity.
We are also furthering our commitment to assess and minimise environmental impacts from our supply chain. While making progress on our existing responsible sourcing targets to create action plans for identified key raw materials of natural origin, we are building a risk-based approach to assess additional new and existing materials’ impacts and dependencies on nature. This is helping prepare us for future reporting to the Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures (TNFD) framework, where we have announced we will be an early adopter. More details of our approach can be found in our Raw Materials Responsible Sourcing Framework.