Sanofi, a French pharmaceutical company with a global franchise extending to 170 countries, views climate change as a public health problem rather than a pure environmental concern. The charts below, shared on Sanofi’s website, highlight the interesting approach the company has taken to categorize both the direct and indirect implications of weather patterns and cycles on human health and society.
Why Sanofi fits into the Terra Alpha approach to investing:
In a keynote address at the Human Rights Council panel discussion on climate change and the right to health, the World Health Organization’s (WHO) Director-General, Margaret Chan, said climate change is the defining issue for public health in the 21st century.
“Climate and weather variables affect the air people breathe, the water they drink, the food they eat, and the chances that they will get infected by a disease,” Dr Chan said.
Sanofi has taken innovative steps to meet the public health challenges posed by climate change. Two of the highest profile issues are the increasing duration of transmission seasons and the increasing geographic range of dengue fever and malaria. Sanofi is focusing R&D on nextgeneration products to combat these diseases. In the last 50 years, dengue’s range has spread from less than 10 countries to 128, encompassing a population of about four billion people, and infecting nearly 400 million per year. Sanofi developed the first approved vaccine against dengue, which should help achieve the WHO’s goals for reducing dengue mortality by 50% andmorbidity by 25% by 2020. Sanofi also has taken significant steps toward preventing malaria, the deadliest parasitic disease, which kills one child every two minutes. Through publicprivate partnerships, it has distributed over 400 million treatments in the last 10 years, mostly to children in Africa, at less than $1 per person.1 Sanofi also has ambitious targets for reducing waste and water use, and its carbon reduction goals–to cut emissions in half by 2025 from a 2015 base and to achieve carbon neutrality by 2050–align with levels required to limit global warming to below 2°C.
Source: https://www.sanofi.com/about-us/empowering-life/preventing-malaria