It’s a tough time to be a sustainability expert in government or part of a social movement.

A survey by Trellis data partner GlobeScan, together with the ERM Institute and Volans, shows experts are increasingly critical of how key actors are performing in advancing sustainable development. Ratings have dropped most sharply for:

• Social movements (down 21 percentage points)
• NGOs (down 16 points)
• Multi-sector partnerships (down 15 points)

National governments receive the lowest score overall, with only 5 percent of experts rating their contributions as excellent. The private sector also saw its lowest performance rating since tracking began in 2012, with just 14 percent of experts viewing its efforts positively. In contrast, academic and research institutions are gaining recognition, with half of experts rating their contributions positively.

What this means

These findings reflect a broader crisis of confidence in the institutions traditionally seen as drivers of sustainable development. As experts grow more critical of governments, NGOs, social movements and corporate actors, a clear message emerges: current approaches aren’t delivering the scale or speed of change needed to meet today’s environmental and social challenges.

The rise in credibility for academic and research institutions suggests a shift in expectations toward actors that are seen as less politicized, more evidence-driven and better equipped to develop innovative, systems-level solutions. 

Based on a survey of 844 sustainability practitioners across 72 countries globally conducted April-May 2025.

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GSK has committed to reducing more emissions faster than any other large pharmaceutical company. 

Now it has five years left to deliver.

Special Series

Chasing Net Zero

Intro: A case-by-case look at corporate progress on 2030 climate goals

Profile 1: Nestlé is on track to halve emissions by 2030. Here’s how (holes and all)

Methodology: How we assess a company’s progress on net zero

By 2030, the London-based pharmaceutical company has promised to slash direct and indirect greenhouse gas emissions by 80 percent, relative to a 2020 baseline. It did so even though it has the industry’s highest emissions intensity, as measured by metric tons of emissions per dollar of revenue

So far, it is not on track to meet its goals. By 2023, the last year for which it published full data, GSK’s emissions had fallen 12 percent — half the pace it needs to reach its 2030 target. 

But the numbers do not tell the whole story. This profile in the Chasing Net Zero series — our company-by-company look at progress toward 2030 climate goals that kicked off with Nestlé and IKEA’s biggest retailer — reveals that GSK’s decarbonization plan includes two initiatives that, if successful, would lead to dramatic emissions cuts. 

One is common to almost all large companies: GSK is working with industry groups to convince pharma suppliers to reduce the emissions of their products. The news here is mixed: Ingredient manufacturers, many of which are in China and India, have started to engage, but actual emissions reductions have been slow to appear.

The other initiative is a sector-specific project that promises tantalizing results. If GSK can obtain regulatory approval and widespread adoption of a new version of its flagship Ventolin asthma inhaler, it would at a stroke eliminate close to half of its emissions.

GSK declined to make any executives available for this article, but in a recent podcast, Giulia Usai, GSK’s senior director for procurement sustainability, acknowledged the challenge of the 2030 deadline.

“We have less than 60 months to our target; that’s nothing,” she said. “It gives us all anxiety, but at the same time, it helps us prioritize the actions that will give us quicker results.”

The commitment: A big promise from a company in transition

Since taking over as chief executive in 2017, Emma Walmsley has faced relentless criticism from investors complaining that GSK lacks the lucrative pipeline needed to replace products losing patent protection. During Walmsley’s term, the company has fallen from seventh in the industry by revenue to 12th, in part because she spun out consumer businesses in 2022 to focus on lines with higher potential, including vaccines and treatments for respiratory diseases, HIV and cancer.

Despite these struggles, Walmsley has made unusually aggressive climate and nature commitments: 

• Reducing GSK’s Scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions — which totaled 11 million tons of carbon dioxide equivalent in 2020 — by 80 percent by 2030. (The company excluded Scope 3 categories representing 2 percent of its 2020 emissions from its goals.)
• Becoming carbon neutral by 2030 by using carbon credits to offset the remaining 20 percent of its emissions. 
• Reducing its emissions by 90 percent from 2020 levels by 2045, a net-zero commitment validated by the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi). 

“They really understand the interconnections between health, climate and nature,” said Amy Booth, a University of Oxford researcher studying sustainability in the pharmaceutical industry. She praised GSK’s early commitment to transparency and to address its impact on biodiversity. (The company was the first to publish disclosures in line with Taskforce for Nature-related Financial Disclosures standards.)

“They are one of the better companies at reporting data,” she said. “They report extensively across Scopes 1, 2 and 3, and provide pages of methodology backing up their data.”

The context: Pharma companies are engaged 

GSK is not alone in its industry in setting ambitious climate goals. 

Eighteen of the top 20 publicly traded pharma companies have had near-term commitments validated by the SBTi. Several say they will eliminate nearly all of their Scope 1 and 2 emissions — those from company facilities and from purchased electricity, respectively — before 2030, largely by shifting to renewable electricity sources.

Eight of the top 20 also have long-term SBTi commitments. Seven are based in Europe, where drugmakers face pressure to reduce their climate impact from national health systems and European Union regulations that apply to all large companies.

More than 90 percent of most pharma companies’ emissions lie in value chains, with the largest component of these Scope 3 emissions coming from the raw ingredients in their products. Transportation can also be a significant source of emissions because many drugs require refrigeration, sometimes at very low temperatures.

Here GSK stands out: Its 80-percent Scope 3 commitment is the largest in the industry. The industry’s next highest Scope 3 goal is AstraZeneca’s, GSK’s larger British rival, which has promised a 50-percent reduction by 2030.

Scopes 1 and 2: Rapid shift to renewable energy

While Scopes 1 and 2 represent a small fraction of GSK’s overall carbon footprint, the company has made the largest reductions so far in this area, mainly by investing in renewable energy. It is increasingly purchasing electricity from renewable sources. And it’s replacing some of its on-site generators that burn fossil fuels with wind and solar generation systems. 

Last year, for example, GSK activated two wind turbines and a 56-acre solar farm at its plant in Irvine, Scotland. The plant produces a majority of the world’s supply of the antibiotic Augmentin, which is made using an energy-intensive fermentation process. With the new capacity, more than half of the facility’s energy will come from its on-site wind and solar generation.

In addition, the company has made progress in improving the efficiency of its manufacturing processes, especially by reducing the gas leakage during inhaler manufacturing.

Scope 3: Reengineering a problematic product

GSK is the world’s leading maker of drugs to treat asthma and other respiratory diseases, propelled by the success of Ventolin, which it introduced in 1968. Even though GSK’s patents have expired and generics are available, 35 million patients worldwide used the company’s version in 2024, accounting for sales of almost $890 million, 2 percent of GSK’s revenue.

A puff from Ventolin’s ubiquitous L-shaped inhaler offers immediate relief from asthma symptoms. Unfortunately, each puff is also powered by R-134a, a gas that traps 1,400 times more heat than CO₂. GSK plans to switch to a chemical known as HFA 152a, made by Orbia, the large Mexican company. The new propellant cuts carbon emissions by 90 percent. 

It’s not as simple as substituting one gas for another, however. The drug formula and the inhaler mechanism need to be adjusted to work with the new propellant. The revised product is now in phase III clinical trials, and GSK hopes to submit the results for regulatory approval next year. HFA 152a is also highly flammable and has to be manufactured with elaborate safety precautions. GSK has started building new production lines for low-carbon Ventolin at its factory in Evreux, France.

“In the medicines sector, changing a product is costly, challenging and not guaranteed,” said Claire Lund, GSK’s vice president of environmental sustainability, on a recent podcast. “We have to work with multiple regulators in multiple countries, and we have to set up a global supply chain.”

Will GSK be able to accomplish the biggest item on its decarbonization checklist? While the results from the clinical trials are not yet available, there is evidence that the new class of propellants can be effective. Last month, British regulators approved a low-carbon version of AstraZenica’s Trixeo inhaler that used a similar propellant. 

Scope 3: Coaxing suppliers

The prospects are harder to assess for GSK’s other major Scope 3 challenge: reducing the emissions embedded in the products it buys, especially the raw ingredients for drugs. These made up 30 percent of the company’s emissions in 2020. With just a 9-percent cut since 2020, progress is well short of the pace needed for an 80-percent reduction by 2030.

In 2021, GSK and six other drug companies formed Energize, an effort to help suppliers reduce their energy consumption. “It took a lot of blood, sweat and tears” to negotiate the legal agreements between rival companies, Usai said. Still, she concluded that “it’s going to be much more impactful to approach our suppliers as a group, as opposed to doing it on our own.”

Last September, for example, Energize negotiated a deal for five industry suppliers and three pharmaceutical companies to buy 560 GWh of renewable energy a year from seven new solar projects in Spain. 

“Energize has gone above and beyond just telling suppliers to do stuff,” observes Booth, the Oxford researcher. “They are actually supporting them to get access to renewable energy.”

Another component of the goods and services challenge — getting suppliers to rethink how they manufacture products — has proven tougher than expected.

“However big and complicated you think the challenge is, it is probably even bigger and even more complicated,” the company wrote in a 2022 report on its climate efforts. 

For example, GSK discovered the most significant emission sources for some suppliers were solvents, which are energy-intensive to produce and release volatile organic compounds that break down into greenhouse gases. GSK must now reach out to the makers of these solvents to encourage new, lower-emission production techniques.

“Green chemistry has a long time horizon,” observed David Linich, a sustainability partner at PwC. “Many pharmaceutical companies have started exploring green alternatives that have a lower environmental impact than traditional methods, but if you are starting the R&D now, you may not see the benefit for decades.”

It’s also not clear that all suppliers are eager to rework operations so that pharmaceutical companies can report lower Scope 3 emissions. After all, many of them are in countries such as China and India, where they are under less government pressure to cut emissions than they are in Europe. Growing international trade tensions may further discourage cooperation.

“You would think that Big Pharma has a lot of power to tell suppliers what to do, but it’s actually almost the opposite,” Booth said. “There may only be a niche supplier of an active pharmaceutical ingredient, and they can say we don’t need to sell to you because we have other customers.”  

Big pharma companies also have massive, complex supply chains around the world, she said. “Their suppliers are often in countries that don’t have strict environmental regulations. And even if they want to take action, there may not be ready sources of renewable energy.”

Toward 2030: Getting numbers on the board

All this diligent effort doesn’t erase a cold fact: GSK promised to eliminate 8.5 million metric tons of emissions over the 10 years ending in 2030 and, during the first three years of that period, it shaved its emissions by just 1.2 million tons. (The company reported an additional cut of 0.5 million tons in 2024 from Scopes 1 and 2, plus some Scope 3 categories, but won’t release its full 2024 numbers until next year.)

If GSK can replace all of its Ventolin inhalers with its newer model, the company would wipe out another 4.1 million tons, leaving around 2.7 million remaining. To meet its target, GSK would need to reduce its supplier emissions and the other smaller Scope 3 categories by 50 percent. 

There’s little in the results GSK has published so far or in the moves of its competitors to suggest that emissions reductions of this magnitude are possible over the next five years. A “Pathway to Net Zero” graph that GSK published earlier this year shows a slow reduction in emissions through 2026, followed by a drop so steep it would make a hardened roller coaster fan scream. The company declined to answer repeated requests to explain its thinking.

If GSK misses its target, it’s worth remembering the company set itself a bigger challenge than many of its peers. Companies that bet big on sustainability often get criticized for falling short. In this case, that may simply mean falling in line.

GSK, however, is not pleading for more time, at least not yet. In podcast interviews, GSK officials have suggested they initially put more emphasis on laying the groundwork for their reductions than finding savings that would appear in their published disclosures. As the deadline nears, they have a renewed focus on accomplishments they can boast about.

“We know that the projects like Energize are producing real savings,” Usai said. “Now is the time for us to show the benefits of what we’ve been doing to the world.”

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Kenvue, the consumer goods company behind brands including Tylenol, Neutrogena and Listerine, is training its 1,800-person research and development workforce to include environmental metrics in their innovation process.

The move follows an internal trial of Kenvue’s patent-pending product assessment tool, the Sustainable Innovation Profiler. R&D teams, product formulators and packaging engineers can use the tool to evaluate a product’s environmental and emissions footprints, green chemistry credentials and packaging makeup. The rollout will continue amid a strategic review of the company, launched after the ouster of its CEO in mid-July.

The Sustainable Innovation Profiler was used to evaluate the impact of reformulations and packaging redesigns for 20 Kenvue product lines during 2024, including OGX Argan Oil of Morocco shampoo and Nicorette lozenges. While the individual results for those products were unique, the profiler documented carbon footprint reductions of at least 16 percent for both. 

The evaluation results convinced Kenvue to introduce the tool into its product-design process from the beginning, said Jennifer Duran, global head of sustainability. “With the Sustainable Innovation Profiler, we’re really modeling the sustainability impacts of the different development designs that we’re making,” Duran said.

Strategy shift

The decision to embed sustainability metrics more deeply into product development dovetails with a restructuring that saw Duran promoted to group head of sustainability in June after focusing on product resilience and sustainability. She reports to Kenvue’s chief scientific officer, with dotted lines to the operations and corporate affairs teams.

The Sustainable Innovation Profiler supports Kenvue’s goal, adopted in May 2024, to screen 75 percent of the company’s new product development projects for improved environmental performance by 2030. It could apply to anything from a straightforward packaging overhaul to a complete product reformulation, Duran said.

So far, 600 product designers and packaging engineers have completed online training to use the resource. Anyone can take the course, but for certain design roles and groups it’s mandatory. “These are the people making decisions about the recipes of our products,” Duran said.

Overarching design principles

The Sustainable Innovation Profiler builds on life-cycle assessment approaches used by the European Commission’s Product Environment Footprint and the Global Aquatic Ingredient Assessment. It studies four categories of environmental metrics:

• Environmental footprint, including water, land and resource use; whether the product disrupts the nutrients in marine or fresh water (which can cause algae blooms); and ecotoxicity
• Carbon footprint, measured by greenhouse gas emissions
• Green chemistry, such as the use of ingredients with improved biodegradability
• Packaging circularity that reduces virgin plastic use

Designers compared scores for each category against a baseline to identify areas of potential improved environmental performance. The tool flags ingredients Kenvue has on its internal watch list, which includes information about restricted substances and materials, and newer options that aren’t widely adopted. It also looks for “hotspots” related to 40 chemical ingredients that carry the highest carbon emissions. 

The Argan shampoo considered in the trial earned better scores across all four categories of the profiler by replacing the surfactant, reducing the use of silicone and polymers and using a bottle made out of recycled plastic.

The data used in the profiler comes from Kenvue’s own product life-cycle assessments and existing databases maintained by respected industry associations. Over time, the company will add information contributed directly by suppliers. Kenvue’s sustainability team is collaborating with the company’s new chief data officer to develop processes for collecting this information in Kenvue’s broader enterprise information management systems.

“The advantage of being a two-year-old company in this pretty mature sustainability space is we can learn from some of the mistakes others have made,” Duran said. (Kenvue, a former division of Johnson & Johnson, became a publicly traded independent company in 2023.) “If we start ingesting primary carbon data, we need to have a place to put it.”

The weighting for each category considered by the Sustainable Innovation Profiler remains the same across different product lines. Kenvue intends to publish more information about the methodology as it becomes more widely used across the company. It also plans to report progress against its sustainable product innovation goal in its next sustainability report, to be published in 2026.

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Google’s ambitious plans to power its data centers directly with low-carbon electricity now includes hydropower, a power generation resource that’s still eligible for tax incentives under the Trump administration’s new budget law.

The tech company will initially spend $3 billion under a unique arrangement announced July 15 with energy developer Brookfield Renewable. In return, Brookfield will supply Google with up to 3 gigawatts of hydro generating capacity in the U.S.

Google’s financial support will enable Brookfield to update and relicense existing hydro facilities. The first two hydro plants covered under the deal are in Pennsylvania on the lower Susquehanna River: Holtwood, the oldest of three dams built around 1905 and 1910; and Safe Harbor, constructed in the 1930s and featuring fish lifts that aid upriver migration.

Google will invest $25 billion by 2027 on a data center expansion in the mid-Atlantic region, where the plants are located and run by the PJM transmission organization. The tech company has signed a 20-year power purchase agreement for each of these facilities, covering 670 megawatts in capacity.

Brookfield and Google will also evaluate hydro plants in the central U.S., covered by the Midcontinent Independent System Operator.

Some big technology companies, such as IBM, discuss hydro as an important piece of their renewable electricity portfolios, but the Google-Brookfield deal is the first publicly declared corporate procurement centered on this generating source.

Google declined to provide more details on its evolving hydro strategy, and Brookfield did not respond to requests for comment.

Fresh look at hydropower

More large corporations are re-evaluating hydropower as part of the portfolio of options required to reduce emissions from purchased energy, or Scope 2. “It’s attractive, cheap, consistent power,” said Gregory Lavigne Jr., partner in the energy, project finance and infrastructure practice at corporate law firm Sidley. 

New greenfield hydro projects are unlikely in the U.S. but more companies are looking to expansions of existing projects as a source of clean baseload power, said Rick Powell, CEO of the Clean Energy Buyers Association. “Most of the hydro capacity has already been tapped, but there is potential for upgrades and relicensing,” he said.

Hydropower is the largest global source of renewable electricity, and likely to remain so through 2030 until solar and wind catch up, according to the International Energy Association. The U.S. is the third-largest producer of hydroelectricity, after China and Brazil, with at least half of its capacity concentrated in the west, particularly Washington, California and Oregon. In 2023, hydroelectricity contributed about 6 percent of all U.S. utility-scale generation, or about 240 billion kilowatt-hours. 

Hydropower is a controversial renewable energy source, because of the impact dams have on local habitats and communities, especially in periods of drought. Despite those reservations, the Inflation Reduction Act created tax incentives for new generation sources such as pumped storage, incremental conventional hydropower and marine and hydrokinetic technologies. Those incentives were among those spared in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act: they’re intact until 2033.

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Microsoft’s history of dominating the market for carbon removal continued when the tech giant announced late last week it was buying 4.9 million tons of removal credits from Vaulted Deep, a startup that buries organic waste underground. Here’s what prospective buyers and other carbon credit players need to know about the deal.

It’s not all about human waste

The Wall Street Journal described the deal thus: “Microsoft wants your poop to lower its emissions.” 

That’s not quite right, according to Vaulted co-founder and CEO Julia Reichelstein. The startup takes multiple different types of organic waste, including manure and sludge from paper mills, and injects it hundreds or thousands of feet below the ground. This “bioslurry” contains carbon that was removed from the atmosphere by plants before being eaten by animals or used in paper processing, making the process carbon negative.

But, yes, excrement is involved. Vaulted’s bioslurry injection technology was originally developed as means of disposing of waste from a water treatment plant in Los Angeles, and human fecal matter will be an important input going forward.

Will the credits deliver real climate value?

One of the biggest problems in carbon markets is proving “additionality’ — knowing that credit revenue is essential to making a project work. Some forest conservation schemes, for example, have been criticized for selling carbon credits to protect forests that were really not at risk. 

Vaulted’s process is clearly additional, said Reichelstein, because the vast majority of the organic waste it’s targeting in the U.S. is spread on land, incinerated or sent to landfill, releasing carbon dioxide and methane in the process. Without a commercial incentive or regulatory requirement to do otherwise, credit revenues are needed to fund the removal.

Buyers will want that and other claims — including guarantees that the carbon will not seep back into the atmosphere — to be verified by an independent third party. At present, none of the carbon credit rating agencies have assessed Vaulted’s projects. But the startup does have important proof points. It follows a methodology developed by Isometric, a credit registry with a reputation for thoroughness. Microsoft is also known for doing extensive due diligence on prospective sellers, as is Frontier, a coalition of removal buyers that purchased a total of slightly more than 150,000 credits from Vaulted in 2023 and 2024.

“Having them do months and months and months of diligence on us and deciding to purchase from us is good industry validation,” argued Reichelstein.

What you can expect to pay for a Vaulted credit

The cost of the Microsoft deal was not disclosed, but Frontier paid $58 million for its credits, putting the per-ton price just over $380. For comparison, other recent deals involving “durable” removal — defined as locking away carbon for hundreds or thousands of years — include direct air capture, which costs $500 per ton or more, biomass electricity generation with carbon capture ($350/t) and carbon capture at pulp and paper plants (less than $200/t).

Prices of all these credit types are expected to fall, however. Frontier is willing to pay high prices to back emerging technologies, but the coalition only backs projects that can demonstrate a plausible path to reducing costs to less than $100/t. Reichelstein said she expected Vaulted’s costs to come “dramatically down” and to be competitive with other methods for storing biomass.

Where buyers can find Vaulted credits

Vaulted’s operations are relatively small scale at present: The company has generated 18,000 credits from a facility in Hutchinson, Kansas, that has been operating since August 2023. Thanks to the deals with Frontier and Microsoft, it’s now scouting other sites to fulfill those contracts and bring more credits to market. Vaulted is already developing a site in Monarch Fields, Colorado, and has applied for permits to develop a facility at an undisclosed location on the East Coast, said Reichelstein.

The challenge is in part about finding sites that are close enough to bioslurry sources for the process to make economic sense. The supply of waste itself shouldn’t be an issue: Reichelstein said the U.S. produces around 1 billion tons of “unused or unusable” organic waste annually, enough to generate hundreds of millions of tons of removal credits.

Companies interested in purchasing credits can explore offtake agreements like the one signed by Microsoft or purchase in smaller amounts direct from the Vaulted Deep website.

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