Pfizers miljö- och ansvarsblogg

We have now started the planning for Earth Hour 2011

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It feels pretty good that, at the same time as the start-up of the UN Climate Change Conference in Cancun, we have had a first discussion on Earth Hour 2011 here in Sweden. Earth Hour is WWF’s campaign regarding claimate change. I participated today in a meeting together with several other company representatives and Barbara Evaeus, project manager for Earth Hour in WWF Sweden.

Earth Hour 2011 will take place on March 26, 20.30 - 21.30. But before talking about Earth Hour 2011, Barbara gave us some key numbers for Earth Hour 2010:

- 128 countries participated, and 4616 cities. More than a billion people around the globe were reached by the event!

- 53% of the Swedish population participated in Earth Hour, and 97% of the Swedes had heard about the initiative. 73% said they were positive to Earth Hour.

- Of the Swedish companies who participated 2010, 68% felt that the initiative increased the engagement for fighting climate change among the employees, 53% said it helped in energy saving programs, and 43% said it was a very important signal to politicians.

Pfizer Sweden uses the Earth Hour initiative to increase awareness - focusing our own colleagues primarily - of our environmental programs in general and our climate change efforts specifically. If you are interested, please read my blog posts from last year’s week leading up to Earth Hour (March 22, March 23, March 24, March 25, March 26) and the blog post from the day after (March 28). And yes, they are all in Swedish, but you might recognize me playing the violin…

Concert during Earth Hour 2010

There were a lot of different ideas for activities during Earth Hour 2011. And it will be very interesting to see how the ideas develop. The motto for Earth Hour 2011 will be “beyond the hour”, i.e. how do we secure that the engagement and the awareness created gives results “beyond the hour”. To get inspired already please view the Earth Hour 2011 Official Video, and sign on for participation.

UN climate conference starts today

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As I wrote yesterday, the UN conference on climate change starts in Cancun today. The conference has received quite good coverage in the newspapers over the recent days. I recommend my Swedish followers to read the DN article about the start of the conference and the SvD article by Susanna Baltscheffsky. In the latter article 5 areas are described where decisions are needed, if a new strong agreement should be possible:

1. Emissions: One of the results from last year’s meeting in Copenhagen was a list of the size of reductions in greenhouse gas emissions until 2020 different countries committed to. However, the reductions are not deemed satisfactory to stay below a two degree temerature increase, and the Copenhagen Accord is not legally bonding.

2. Money: How is going to pay the investments needed to decrease the releases? And how will it be administrated?

3. Kyoto Protocol: What will happen with the Kyoto Protocol after 2012?

4. Transparency: What is needed for countries to believe data from other countries?

5. Deforestation: How to proceed with the discussions on deforestation and degradation (REDD)

As I have said previously, I understand the huge challenges to reach a common understanding and faith between all different countries in a mega negotiation of this kind. Hence, sometimes I feel happy to work in the private sector where we can set our goal and objectives, and make necessary decisions, without long and tough negotiations with all our competitors…

If you like to read about Pfizer’s Energy and Climate initiatives I recommend you to use this link to our global web page. You can also get some inspiration from our track record over the years regarding reductions in the emissions of green house gases from this figure:

Pfizer Climate Change Goal

From 2000 to 2007, the releases were reduced by 43% (indexed by sales). The new objective is to take another 20% in absolute reductions until 2012. My message with this is: It can be done. Let’s see whether or not our politicians can agree on challeging, but reasonable, objectives!

As you know, fighting climate change is important for a number of reasons. One of them being public health. Climate changes lead to:

- Sea level rise
- More adverse weather events
- Adverse impacts to freshwater supplies
- Human health impacts including:
– Illness from more heat waves
– Unsanitary conditions due to increased coastal flooding
– Vector-borne diseases with longer transmission seasons
– Change in geographical distribution of diseases

Hence, as a company “working together for a healthier world”, this is a very important issue for us!

COP16 starts tomorrow

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United Nations Climate Change Conference in Cancun in Mexico (COP16, Nov 29th to December 10th) starts tomorrow. Remember last year’s extremely high expectations for the COP15 meeting in Copenhagen - and the extremely poor result. It will be interesting to see the outcome of the discussions this year. What will the result be from the extremely low expectations on COP16? Follow my blog and read my comments during the coming weeks.

Secondary, or passive, smoking kills hundreds of thousands

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Today, as we are approaching the end of the “tobacco-free week“, the top news article in both radio and in newspapers here in Swden, has been the Lancet article on secondary (or passive) smoking (see DN.se for instance). A number of scientists have on behalf of WHO made a first global study on the effects of secondary smoking. The scientists have reviewed data from 192 countries and made the horrifying and scary estimates that secondary smoking kills 600 000 people annually, of which 165 000 are children… This means that roughly one out of every hundred people dying every year, is being killed by smoking - without smoking themselves…

This is not acceptable! Tougher regulations are one possibility, but as I said in my blog post in the beginning of the week, we also need to change the attitudes towards tobacco. Kids need to feel good and cool when they say “no to tobacco”. They need to find celebrity idols that do not smoke. Smoking celebrities are such bad role models!

Please help us in fighting tobacco use among kids. Join the Dizza Tobak-movement!

http://www.dn.se/nyheter/sverige/passiv-rokning-dodar-600000-per-ar-1.1216231

Follow me on twitter

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Starting today you can now follow me on twitter. My intentions with the twitter account is to give you brief updates on CSR and environmental matters, and guide you to relevant blog posts or similar sources of additional information.

You’ll find me at CSRBengt