Carbon footprint of the global pharmaceutical industry and relative impact of its major players
Carbon footprint of the global pharmaceutical industry and relative impact of its major players
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DOI：
10.1016/j.jclepro.2018.11.204
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发表时间：
2019-03-20
影响因子：
11.1
通讯作者：
Elmeligi, Ahmed
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
Belkhir, Lotfi;Elmeligi, Ahmed
尽管全球遏制碳排放的紧迫性日益提高，但医疗保健行业，特别是制药行业，在对全球碳足迹的贡献方面，很少受到可持续发展界的关注。在本文中，我们对制药行业的总体贡献和历史排放趋势进行了分析，并对世界主要制药公司进行了行业比较分析。令人惊讶的是，我们的分析显示，制药行业的排放强度明显高于汽车行业。我们还使用先前发布的数学框架，将国家目标排放量与制药行业的目标排放强度联系起来，以得出美国根据现已失效的奥巴马政府在2015年巴黎协定中的承诺履行其减排承诺所需的制药行业的排放强度。我们确定了前15家制药公司中的超额排放者，这些公司在改善排放方面处于领先地位。结果是非常有启发性的，因为我们发现前15名制药公司之间的差异远远大于前10名汽车公司，这表明行业内存在一套非常不同的环境实践。该文件应引起对制药部门环境绩效的进一步深入研究，并帮助决策者、企业领导人和学者了解如何帮助遏制这一重要和不断增长的工业部门的这种不必要的排放水平。(C)2018爱思唯尔有限公司版权所有
Despite the heightened urgency of curbing carbon emissions around the world, the healthcare sector in general, and the pharmaceutical sector in particular have received very little attention from the sustainability community in terms of their contribution to the global carbon footprint. In this paper, we conduct an analysis of the overall contributions and the historical emissions trends of the pharmaceutical sector, as well as an industry-specific comparative analysis of the major pharmaceutical companies in the world. Surprisingly, our analysis reveals that the pharmaceutical industry is significantly more emission intensive than the automotive industry. We also use a previously published mathematical framework linking national target emissions to the target emission intensity of the pharmaceutical sector to derive the emission intensity of the pharmaceutical sector required for the US to meet its reductions commitments per the now defunct Obama-administration commitments at the 2015 Paris Agreement. We identify the excess emitters among the top-15 Pharmaceutical companies, from those that are leading the pack with their emissions improvement efforts. The results are quite instructive as we find a far greater variability amongst the Top-15 pharmaceuticals than the Top-10 automotive companies, suggesting a very disparate set of environmental practices within the industry. The paper should elicit further in-depth studies of the environmental performance of the pharmaceutical sector and help inform policy makers, business leaders and academicians on how to help curb this unwarranted level of emissions in this important and growing industry sector. (C) 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.