- Katarina Ageborg was appointed head of sustainability at AstraZeneca in 2015 and has served as chief compliance officer since 2011.
- AstraZeneca recently released its 7th annual sustainability report, focused heavily on issues such as access to healthcare, environmental protection, and ethics and transparency strategy.
- This article is part of a series analyzing ESG reporting trends. For more click here.
The year 2021 was one of big impact for pharmaceutical leader AstraZeneca, which supplied over 2.5 billion doses of COVID-19 vaccines to more than 180 countries. But when it comes to ESG reporting, the British-Swedish pharmaceutical and biotechnology leader based in Cambridge, England, has also made sure to focus squarely on the areas where they make the most impact, that are measurable, and that have a governance process.
"We have been sticking to focusing on issues such as access to healthcare, environmental protection, and our ethics and transparency strategy, '' Katarina Ageborg, who was appointed EVP of sustainability in 2015, told Insider. "It's about equitable access, affordability and pricing, as well as healthcare resilience, and then an ambitious zero carbon goal, product sustainability, and natural resources." Since the company's culture is also very driven around its corporate values, the focus on ethics and transparency is also crucial, she added: "As I have also served as chief compliance officer since 2011, that piece is close to my heart."
The company has published an annual report on ESG issues since she took on the EVP of sustainability role, and sustainability "is part of our organizational DNA, embedded from the lab to the patient, and delivered thanks to the efforts of over 80,000 employees," Ageborg wrote in the opening to AstraZeneca's 2021 report.
But she joked that the company has also tried to rein in its size. "This year's report is a very big document, but we made it shorter than last year, believe it or not," she said.
Short or long, Ageborg emphasized that ESG reporting needs to be accurate and transparent. "We also want to have as much data as possible without overloading people, so that those from the outside can evaluate what we are doing objectively while still keeping it interesting," she said. "We make sure that we have the most up-to-date, accurate information even for a big organization with lots of groups feeding into the report — it's about fine-tuning it, making it better and clearer, and listening to others who are interested in using this document."
That includes managing expectations from various stakeholders, she added, while keeping up with possible new legislation related to financial sustainability and disclosure commitments. "The biggest challenge is that there is so much information but it needs to be presented in specific ways so those who are reviewing what we are doing can compare like to like," she said. Since the 2021 report came out, "We're already seeing that we get great feedback that can be useful for the next round of reporting."
Ageborg said she is particularly proud of AstraZeneca's 2021 Sustainability Report's section on access to healthcare, which states an ambition of "increasing access to life-saving treatments, promoting prevention, and strengthening global healthcare resilience and sustainability."
"We know that we reached so many patients through the vaccine that we developed, and that I think has a lot to do with the collaboration around the world and working together with governments and companies," she said.
She is also proud of the report's discussion around the strategy underpinning AstraZeneca's climate strategy goals. "We are one of the role models in the pharmaceutical industry in terms of setting those targets and underpinning it with data, investments and plans for addressing carbon issues throughout the world," she said.
But even though AstraZeneca has come a long way in their ESG reporting efforts, Ageborg said that she wants to make sure people don't lose momentum, because sustainability plays such an important role in the culture of the company. "That said, I can't promise the report will be shorter next year," she said. "That would be one of the biggest challenges."