AstraZeneca’s head of sustainability on the pharma giant’s climate efforts

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This week’s Making Rounds spotlights Pam Cheng, EVP of global operations and IT, and chief sustainability officer at AstraZeneca. Cheng was tapped to head the pharmaceutical giant’s sustainability efforts three years ago after joining in 2015. She has worked in operations, supply chain, and IT roles during her tenure at the company.

In her time at AstraZeneca, the company’s revenue more than doubled, from $24.7 billion in 2015 to $58.7 billion in 2025.

“Many companies say we can’t reduce our emissions because our business is growing, our volume is growing,” she said. “I think we’ve just proved that you can do that, you can double your revenue, you can have significant growth, but at the same time you can still be sustainable and reduce your emissions.”

Cheng talked with Healthcare Brew about AstraZeneca’s sustainability priorities and how the company has worked to reduce its emissions.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

What are AstraZeneca’s primary goals when it comes to sustainability?

We pledged a billion dollars in 2020 in a program called Ambition Zero Carbon, and that effectively says we will decarbonize our value chain by 2030. I think by 2023 we realized how tough these targets were. But one of the things that I am super proud of is that we’ve not taken a step back.

We also pledged back in 2021 that by 2026 we would reduce our Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions [greenhouse gases produced directly and indirectly by the company, respectively] by 98%, using 2015 as the baseline. As of December 2025, we reduced it by 88%. We’ve obviously got this year to get to 98%, and I can tell you we’re tracking very well. By December 31 this year, we will realize that 98% reduction.

What steps have you taken to reduce your emissions?

As part of scaling up drug development, you use a lot of material. You use chemical solvents, you use water, you use energy-intensive processes. So a big part of what we have done over the past few years is that we’ve reduced the amount of energy and the amount of water we use in our new processes. We reduced our water use by 23%. When it comes to manufacturing, instead of using natural gas, we are using renewable energy. All of our manufacturing and R&D facilities in the United States use renewable energy, meaning biomethane and biogas.

One of the medicines we have is what we call PMDIs, pressurized metered dose inhalers. There’s a propellant inside the device because it needs it to deliver the medicine directly to patients’ lungs. Propellants have global warming potential, so six years ago we started on a journey working with Honeywell, and we co-developed a propellant that’s suitable for pharmaceutical use that has 99.9% lower global warming potential.

When you change an ingredient, you have to redo your safety study, your toxicity study, and your clinical trials. So we are spending nearly $500 million to switch our inhaler from the traditional propellant to this 99.9% lower global warming potential propellant. We didn’t have to do that. We’re doing it because we believe this is the right thing to do. It’s the right thing to do for the environment, and it’s the right thing to do for the patients.

Why are you passionate about sustainability work?

We fundamentally believe there’s an interdependency between human health, planet health, and societal health. You can’t really have human health if you don’t have planet health. The number of people who die from pollution every year is up in the millions…Because of that we’re saying, look, if we are in the business of making humans healthier and saving lives, then we need to make sure we look after the planet as well. It’s so interdependent that we can’t separate them.