Water stewardship

Water is vital to life on earth. It is a key commodity for the healthcare sector for many reasons, including for the development and manufacture of life-changing medicines where clean water is essential. We use water in our R&D, raw material production and manufacturing processes such as cooling and cleaning, and water is also used by the patients we serve.

Recognising our dependency on water, we are committed to its conservation and stewardship. We work with partners to address shared water challenges, for example where there are water scarcity or supply issues close to our sites.

Our approach to water stewardship

We aim to reduce water use by 20% by 2025, from a 2015 baseline.

We recognise that our business can have adverse impacts on water resources. To minimise these impacts and to use water responsibly, we aim to protect this natural resource for our business, our employees, local communities, and the ecosystems on which they depend:

We strive to use water responsibly, recognising that our business, employees, local communities and the ecosystems surrounding our sites all depend on water. We are demonstrating water stewardship in the following ways:

• Across our sites: Decoupling water demand from business growth with water efficiency key performance indicators; setting site-specific water targets in line with the local context.
• In drug development: Adopting resource efficiency targets to reduce water demand in drug development; conducting life cycle assessments (LCAs) to calculate the water footprint across the product life cycle, including for raw materials in the drug substance. Learn more about our approach to Product sustainability.
• Focusing on water quality: Applying, assessing and reporting against safe discharge targets for active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs) produced or formulated at manufacturing sites, including our suppliers. Monitoring water quality impacts from the manufacture and patient use of products through environmental risk assessments and reporting via our EcoPharmacoVigilance Dashboard. Find out more about our approach to Pharmaceuticals in the environment (PIE). 
• In our supply chain: Creating action plans for key natural raw materials and developing a risk-based approach to assess the impacts and dependencies of new and existing materials on nature. Learn more about our approach to Sustainable use and sourcing of raw materials. 
• In locations we rely on: Forming partnerships to drive collective action in river basins across our value chain, supported by our Climate Adaptation and Nature Fund.

Taking collaborative action

Global experts support us in enhancing our understanding of local water contexts, both at our sites and across our supply chain.  

• WWF: The World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) Water Risk Filter tool identifies global water risks, helping us prioritise action across our value chain. Our ongoing partnership with WWF helps strengthen our water stewardship strategy and focus on catalysing water-related opportunities to scale collective action within our sector.
• AWS: As members of the Alliance for Water Stewardship (AWS), we support a global movement to advance good water stewardship practices. Together with other AWS members, our sites in Bangalore and Chennai, India, participated in Phase 1 of the Alliance for Water Stewardship (AWS) Collective Action Accelerator.

Business Leaders’ Open Call for Accelerating Action on Water

We support the Open Call for Water Action which advocates for collective positive water impact benefiting at least 100 water-stressed basins by 2030. We are building water resilience across our global operations and supply chain and are working collaboratively across sectors in support of positive water impact.

Diagnosing current and future water risks facing the pharmaceutical sector

Through our collaboration with WWF Sweden, we championed a sector-level water risk assessment of the global pharmaceutical supply chain and published a case study on using scenarios to assess future climate-related risks. We are also taking action by:

• Leading with stewardship rather than management: Adopting water stewardship as a default framing enables better collaboration in addressing external water-related risks. We are enhancing our understanding of shared water challenges and setting locally-appropriate water targets at key sites.
• Addressing water quality across the value chain: We lead the IHI-PREMIER collaboration—a multidisciplinary public-private partnership of experts—aiming to develop tools to address the environmental risks of pharmaceuticals, including in aquatic habitats.
• Understanding raw material water-related risks: We’re taking steps to understand risks within our supply chain. This case study on assessing water risks of commodities illustrates how we worked with WWF to understand water-related risks linked to raw materials for our medicines.
• Responding to water challenges in priority basins: We are collaborating to promote new methods that foster action on freshwater. We contributed to the publication of Unpacking Collective Action in Water Stewardship which includes frameworks for large-scale impact.