Water stewardship

Water is vital to life on earth. Working in partnership with our stakeholders, we are committed to adopting water stewardship practices, making positive contributions to address shared water challenges in the river basins that our business is dependent on.

Our business requires access to clean and plentiful water for the development and manufacture of life-changing medicines. From the production of raw materials to manufacturing processes, including cooling and equipment cleaning, through to patient use, freshwater is used across our value chain.

Our Water Stewardship strategy is embedded within Natural resources, one of our Environmental Protection focus areas.

Our approach

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

• Across AstraZeneca sites: Decoupling water demand from business growth with our 2015–2025 water efficiency key performance indicators; working to link performance targets with the local context by setting site-specific water targets
• In drug development: Adopting Resource Efficiency Targets to reduce the water demand in drug development; conducting Life Cycle assessments (LCAs) to calculate the water footprint across the whole product life cycle including the raw materials used to make the drug substance. See more in Product environmental stewardship
• Maintaining Water Quality: Preventing pollution by applying, assessing, and reporting compliance against safe discharge targets for Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients (APIs) produced or formulated by our manufacturing operations; ensuring water quality is not compromised through patient use of products through environmental risk assessments and reporting via our EcoPharmacoVigilance Dashboard. See more in Pharmaceuticals in the environment (PIE)
• In our supply chain: creating action plans for identified key raw materials of natural origin and building a risk-based approach to assess additional new and existing materials' impacts and dependencies on nature with link to responsible sourcing framework
• In the communities where we operate: Developing partnerships to drive collective action in river basins, supported by our $5m annual commitment to fund nature restoration and water stewardship

We are supported by global experts as we continue to strengthen our understanding of local water context at locations across our network and within our supply chain.

• The WWF Water Risk Filter tool identifies and evaluates water risks around the world, which helps us prioritise where to take action across our value chain. Our ongoing partnership with WWF supports our water stewardship strategy. We are shifting our shared focus to catalysing water-related opportunities and scaling collective action across our sector
• 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 in Bangalore and Chennai are supporting Phase 1 of the Alliance for Water Stewardship (AWS) Impact Accelerator programme.
• 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

Business Leaders’ Open Call for Accelerating Action on Water

We support the Open Call for Water Action towards collective positive water impact to benefit at least 100 water-stressed basins by 2030. We are committed to building water resilience across our global operations and supply chain, and working collaboratively across sectors to accelerate positive water impact.

Diagnosing current and future water risks facing the pharmaceutical sector

Through our continued collaboration with the World Wide Fund for Nature (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 climater-related risks. Further actions we have taken include:

• Leading with stewardship rather than management: Adopting water stewardship as the default framing for water better positions companies to engage with others to find solutions to these external water-related risks. We are building our understanding of shared water challenges and setting locally-appropriate water targets at key sites.
• Strategically addressing water quality more comprehensively across the value chain: Deteriorating global water quality could bring public expectation for action on APIs in the environment, regardless of their source. In a multidisciplinary consortium of public and private sector partnership of experts we lead the IMI-PREMIER collaboration, which aims to identify tools to address the environmental risks of pharmaceuticals, including aquatic habitats.
• Understanding raw material water-related risks: While the quantities of raw materials used in pharmaceutical manufacturing are perceived to be relatively small, links to water intensive sectors such as mining and agriculture, mean the water-related risks of the raw materials part of the value chain may not be so small. We’re taking steps to understand risks deep 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 two strategically important commodities used to produce many of our products – palladium and palm oil.
• Collectively responding to shared water challenges in priority basins: Shared water challenges represent a potential risk and opportunity for the sector to play a leadership role in finding solutions which create benefits for both the sector and surrounding communities. In 2021, we introduced a water stewardship pilot programme to deepen our understanding of the water risks we face in the basins where we operate, as well as what actions to prioritise to mitigate these risks. The pilot is focused on efficient water use within the boundaries of our sites, along with water quality and collective action opportunities in the local basin. We are prioritising six key sites in water-scarce areas across five countries, sites which face increasing availability and quality risks. Shared water challenges represent a potential risk and opportunity for the sector to play a leadership role in finding solutions which create benefits for both the sector and the surrounding communities.

Learn more about Water stewardship in our Sustainability Report.