Nature's Balance Sheet: How GSK Turned Water Risk Into Pharma's First Science-Based Target

GSK's Nashik manufacturing plant sits in Maharashtra's water-stressed Upper Godavari basin. In October 2024, the facility became the first pharmaceutical site in the world with a science-based target for nature validated by the Science Based Targets Network, alongside luxury group Kering and building materials company Holcim in other industries. The target covers freshwater withdrawals, basin replenishment and local stakeholder engagement. Pharma has long been seen as a sustainability laggard, associated with energy-intensive manufacturing, fluorinated propellants, complex supply chains and active pharmaceutical ingredients entering watercourses. Through successive disclosure cycles, GSK has reversed that assumption.

 

New standards and leadership changes

 

Two events in the past six months mark the current moment. In December 2025, the British Standards Institution published PAS 2090:2025, the first global standard defining how to conduct product-level life cycle assessments for pharmaceutical products. GSK sat on the steering group alongside AstraZeneca, Johnson & Johnson Innovative Medicine, Merck KGaA, MSD, Novartis, Novo Nordisk, Pfizer, Roche, Sanofi and Takeda, in a coalition sponsored by NHS England, the UK Office for Life Sciences and the Pharmaceutical LCA Consortium. BSI Chief Executive Susan Taylor Martin described the standard as setting "a new global benchmark for environmental transparency in the pharmaceutical sector."

In March 2026, Claire Lund, who shaped GSK's net-zero and nature-positive strategy over 13 years, left to become Chief Sustainability Officer at National Grid. Adele Cheli, a 12-year GSK veteran previously leading Nature Action and Partnerships, took over as Global Vice President, Sustainability.

 

Why nature-based targets matter

For most of the past decade, corporate sustainability has centred on carbon. The Science Based Targets initiative has now validated climate targets at more than 10,000 companies, collectively representing over 40% of global market capitalisation, according to data confirmed by SBTi in January 2026. The cohort spans more than 90 countries, with Japan, the United Kingdom, the United States and China leading the country tally.

Biodiversity loss and freshwater depletion present separate and equally material risks. WWF's 2024 Living Planet Report, published with the Zoological Society of London in October 2024, documented an average 73% decline in monitored vertebrate wildlife populations between 1970 and 2020, with freshwater populations down 85%. Habitat loss, water extraction and pollution have proved as economically consequential as carbon, particularly for sectors whose supply chains run through stressed basins or biodiverse landscapes.

The Science Based Targets Network is building the framework to address this gap. SBTN's year-long corporate pilot programme, launched in May 2023, enrolled 17 companies to test methodologies for setting validated freshwater and land targets. By COP16 in Cali, Colombia in October 2024, 60% of pilot participants had received validation for some or all of their targets. Three companies publicly adopted theirs at the conference: Kering, Holcim and GSK. GSK was the only pharmaceutical company among them. SBTN has since indicated, in its Climate Week NYC announcement on 24 September 2025, that more than 150 companies, representing at least $5.5 trillion in market capitalisation, are preparing to set science-based targets for nature.

For pharma, this shift reflects operational exposure more than aspiration. The broader healthcare sector accounts for roughly 4.4 to 5% of global greenhouse gas emissions, according to estimates from Trinity Life Sciences and research published by Salud por Derecho, with pharmaceutical manufacturing and supply chains contributing a disproportionate share. A 2019 study published in the Journal of Cleaner Production found that pharma's emissions intensity, measured as CO2 equivalent per unit of revenue, is 55% higher than the automotive sector's. If left unchecked, the pharma sector's carbon footprint is forecast to triple by 2050, according to research cited by DrugandDeviceWorld and the World Economic Forum. Many of the sector's largest factories sit in basins where water availability is no longer assured.

 

GSK's water and carbon initiatives

 

GSK set a 2030 target to reduce overall water use in its operations by 20% from a 2020 baseline. It hit that target in 2022, eight years early. By the end of 2024, total water use was down 28% from the 2020 baseline, including a further 5% reduction in 2024 alone. In water-stressed basins specifically, GSK has identified five sites across Algeria, India and Pakistan where it is pursuing what it calls "water neutrality" by 2030. Each site must achieve Alliance for Water Stewardship Standard certification, reduce withdrawals by at least 20%, and replenish an equivalent volume in the surrounding basin.

The SBTN-validated target attached to Nashik goes further. Rather than reduce withdrawals globally as an abstract average, GSK is now obliged to act on the specific hydrology of the Upper Godavari basin, working with local schools through the Swachh Bharat campaign and with community stakeholders on basin-level water stewardship. When GSK first announced its net-zero and nature-positive environmental goals in November 2020, CEO Emma Walmsley framed the strategic rationale plainly: "As a global healthcare company, we want to play our full part in protecting and restoring the planet's health, in order to protect and improve people's health." That framing, linking planetary health directly to patient health, has guided the company's approach ever since.

💡GSK met its 2030 water reduction target eight years early, in 2022, and has since cut water use a further 8 percentage points. The 28% cumulative reduction at the end of 2024 turned a 2030 target into a 2022 floor.

On carbon, Scope 1 and 2 emissions are down 36% from a 2020 baseline as of the end of 2024, including a 12% reduction in 2024 alone. According to GSK's FY 2025 results announcement on 4 February 2026, the company retained its position on the CDP 2025 A List for Climate Change and Water, after also achieving an A in both categories in the 2024 disclosure cycle, making it two consecutive years at the top of CDP's framework.

Scope 3 emissions present a harder problem, and within Scope 3, one product dominates: Ventolin. GSK's salbutamol metered-dose inhaler is used by approximately 35 million patients globally and, by GSK's November 2025 disclosure, "currently accounts for close to half (45%) of the company's total global carbon footprint," almost entirely because of its HFA-134a propellant, which has a global warming potential of 1,430 over 100 years according to the IPCC's Fourth Assessment Report.

In November 2025, GSK announced positive pivotal phase III data for a next-generation Ventolin using HFA-152a, a low-carbon propellant supplied by the Mexican chemicals group Orbia. The data showed therapeutic equivalence and a comparable safety profile to the existing HFA-134a formulation, supporting a planned launch from 2026 and an approximately 92% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions per inhaler. The new manufacturing line is being built at GSK's Évreux site in France, which is being retooled to handle the flammable propellant. Speaking ahead of COP28, Walmsley placed the programme in a broader context: "As countries work to decarbonise their health systems, companies have an important role to play, and addressing the carbon emissions from inhalers is a key part of this."

GSK has also embedded eco-design across all new medicines and vaccines between 2019 and 2025. In her last LinkedIn post as VP Sustainability, Claire Lund pointed to the low-carbon inhaler transition and the company-wide adoption of eco-design as personal highlights, adding that the team is now "working with our suppliers to access renewable energy."

💡A 92% reduction in per-inhaler emissions multiplied across approximately 300 million salbutamol MDIs sold globally each year, per GSK's own November 2025 Phase III disclosure, represents one of the largest single-product decarbonisation moves in the pharmaceutical sector. It also shows why pharma's emissions profile differs from energy: a handful of molecules can dominate the overall footprint.

 

Building sector-wide tools

 

GSK's approach extends beyond its own operations to sector-level infrastructure. In partnership with the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, GSK convened a working group of leading pharmaceutical companies, including AstraZeneca, Bayer, Novartis, Novo Nordisk, Roche and Takeda, to co-develop the Roadmap to Nature Positive: Foundations for the Pharmaceutical Sector, published by WBCSD in March 2025. The Roadmap sets out priority actions on sourcing, water, pollution and biodiversity for an industry that has historically lacked a sector-specific nature framework. "Action on nature matters for health, climate and long-term business success," Lund said in the WBCSD launch release. "This collaboration is helping to identify and prioritise the key issues for our sector, so that we can drive collective action for nature, people and business resilience."

PAS 2090 complements the Roadmap by providing measurement standards. Developed through public consultation involving over 475 stakeholders across 35 countries and more than 400 comments in the June 2025 public consultation, the standard establishes Product Category Rules for pharmaceutical life cycle assessment. A PAS 2090-compliant LCA tool is planned for release by November 2026, and a sector-specific life cycle inventory database is being developed with Boehringer Ingelheim and ecoinvent, with the first release expected to contain more than 180 regionalised datasets. Both remain in development and are subject to change.

The NHS, itself bound by statutory net-zero obligations, has long struggled to compare the environmental footprint of competing medicines on any consistent basis. PAS 2090, once supported by its planned companion tools, would give procurement teams a defensible methodology and remove the disclosure inconsistency that has made cross-company comparison difficult. "Developed through collaboration across the healthcare sector, PAS 2090 provides the consistency and transparency health systems need to help decarbonise care, while giving companies a practical framework to understand and reduce their product footprints," Lund said in BSI's launch announcement.

 

Remaining challenges

Several unresolved issues qualify the progress described above.

• Scope 3 dominance. Scope 3 emissions still constitute the largest share of GSK's footprint, and the Ventolin HFA-152a transition will not resolve that on its own. Regulatory approval timelines for the new propellant vary by jurisdiction, and the flammability of HFA-152a requires factory rebuilds that take years.
• API pollution. Active pharmaceutical ingredient contamination of waterways, which the WBCSD Roadmap flagged as a priority issue, remains an unresolved challenge across the sector.
• Scope of the SBTN validation. GSK's nature target was part of a cohort announcement alongside Kering and Holcim, and the broader SBTN methodology is still in early iterations. The validation covered freshwater only; land, biodiversity and ocean targets are still ahead. Additional companies from the pilot cohort were given until January 2025 to publicly adopt their validated targets, and the pipeline is growing.
• Pharma's reputational headwinds. Sustainability progress sits alongside unresolved legacy issues. GSK recorded a significant Zantac settlement charge in 2024. The political backlash against ESG in the United States has made some corporate climate communicators more cautious in 2026.
• Slowing sector-wide momentum. The Morgan Stanley Institute for Sustainable Investing's Sustainable Signals: Corporates 2026 report, based on a survey of 300 sustainability decision-makers and published on 8 May 2026, found that while over 90% of corporate sustainability leaders report ongoing progress, the share who believe their companies are exceeding expectations fell from 19% in 2024 to 14% in 2025 to just 5% in 2026. Macroeconomic uncertainty was cited as a top barrier by 36% of respondents, up from 15% in 2025.

GSK's record of sustained delivery and sector convening sits within this broader context of slowing momentum and growing headwinds.

 

Leadership transition

 

Claire Lund's move to National Grid reflects a broader pattern: sustainability leaders who built programmes in manufacturing-intensive sectors are now moving into energy and infrastructure, where the same skills in cross-sector convening, supplier engagement and product-level eco-design apply.

"After an incredible chapter at GSK, I will soon be taking on a new challenge," Lund wrote on LinkedIn. "I'm immensely proud of what we've achieved together. From embedding sustainability into our medicines and vaccines, to accelerating progress on climate and nature and decoupling growth and environmental impact, this has been a true team effort. I'm pleased to be handing the baton to Adele Cheli, who will take on the role of Global VP, Sustainability."

Cheli, who joined GSK 12 years ago, takes responsibility during the mid-decade implementation window when 2030 targets shift from aspirations to auditable commitments. "Exciting news, I've been appointed Global VP, Sustainability at GSK, leading our work globally to deliver more sustainable medicines and vaccines for patients," she wrote on LinkedIn. "A huge thanks to Claire Lund, for the leadership and momentum she has built to date."

💡GSK delivered group turnover of £31.4bn in 2024, up 8% at constant exchange rates, alongside 13% core operating profit growth excluding COVID-19 products. Financial performance and environmental progress improved simultaneously during the same period.

 

Lessons for business

 

GSK's trajectory over the past 24 months offers a practical case study rather than an exceptional one. The company acted early because nature-related risks were already affecting its operations. Water stress in the Godavari basin threatened manufacturing continuity. Regulatory pressure on HFA-134a propellants puts nearly half its carbon footprint on a countdown. NHS net-zero procurement requirements, the European Union's Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive and the SBTN's nature methodology added further weight. Each was a constraint before it became an opportunity. GSK responded sooner than its peers because the cost of inaction was already visible inside its own operating model.

The implication for other sectors is direct. Sustainability leadership tends to follow physical and regulatory exposure rather than voluntary commitment. The companies that respond earliest to their own sector-specific risks, whether those involve water, materials, energy or land use, are the ones most likely to convert compliance into competitive advantage. The alternative is to wait for the equivalent of a drying basin to force the decision.