By Maggie Fick
LONDON (Reuters) – British drugmaker AstraZeneca on Wednesday announced it would invest $400 million to plant over 200 million trees by 2030 as part of its strategy for reducing carbon emissions in line with the Paris Agreement.
The commitment represents about $60 million a year, for one of the UK’s most valuable listed companies, which has a market capitalization of about $230 billion. AstraZeneca made about $44 billion in revenue in 2022.
Still, the new sustainability commitment is far larger than past ones. In 2020, the company announced it would plant and maintain more than 50 million trees by the end of 2025.
AstraZeneca announced earlier this month it would switch to biogas produced from cow manure and food waste in the U.S., to cut its carbon emissions there.
Much of the global pharmaceutical and biotech industry has yet to set targets for reducing carbon emissions in line with the Paris Agreement, researchers have found.
(Reporting by Maggie Fick; Additional reporting by Vincent Flasseur in London; Editing by Louise Heavens)
