Health Systems’ Resilience

As environmental challenges such as climate change and air pollution accelerate, healthcare systems face mounting pressure—from extreme weather events to the rising burden of chronic and infectious diseases. At the same time, the healthcare sector contributes nearly 5% of global CO₂ emissions, with 45% of that total attributable to the patient care pathway.

At Sanofi, we have launched a bold strategy to help build environmentally resilient healthcare as a core part of our sustainability vision. We are building a robust evidence base to drive effective, science-based interventions and solutions that can enhance healthcare system adaptability. We are also spearheading coordinated collective efforts to significantly reduce the environmental impact of healthcare systems while enhancing their resilience and sustainability.

We're leveraging the "seven levers of decarbonization" framework to strengthen our evidence-based approach to reducing healthcare's environmental footprint. This comprehensive model, developed through our leadership in the Sustainable Markets Initiative Health Systems Task Force, provides a structured methodology for identifying and quantifying emission reduction opportunities across patient care pathways. By applying these levers - which include areas such as prevention, treatment optimization, and care setting shifts - we're generating robust data on the carbon impact of various healthcare interventions.

As our understanding of how environmental changes impact human health continues to grow, we are increasingly equipped to integrate environmental considerations into our strategic approach—from research and development to patient care. By incorporating expanding datasets on environment-related diseases into our R&D assessment tools, we have the opportunity to embed these insights throughout the R&D process, supporting more informed and responsive innovation.

We are contributing to coordinated and collective international initiatives that reduce entire healthcare systems’ environmental footprints and improve their resilience. 

For example, Sanofi is actively involved in the Sustainable Market Initiative healthcare system taskforce with the aim to accelerate the delivery of net zero, sustainable healthcare to improve individual, societal and planetary health. The Health Systems Task Force is focusing its attention on delivering action in the following three priority areas: Supply chain, clinical trial digitalization and patient care pathway. 

As part of the different initiatives, Sanofi is leading the “Patient care pathway decarbonization” working group, gathering public and private actors of healthcare systems to focus on identifying opportunities to deliver net-zero patient care while improving health and societal outcomes. 

Leading the Pharma LCA Consortium that came together via the Pharmaceutical Environment Group (PEG) with support from the Sustainable Markets Initiative (SMI), we aim to publish in 2025 a standardized LCA framework for measuring, reporting, and communicating product level environmental footprint data for the pharmaceutical sector.

Through partnerships like the Pharmaceutical Supply Chain Initiative (PSCI) and ENERGIZE, we support suppliers in reducing emissions and embedding sustainability across their value chain.