As we continue to grow as an organisation, the strategic importance of being conscious not only of our markets and our customers but of our environment and communities is more important than ever.
Our Group-wide Sustainability Policy puts the principles of Integrity, Inclusivity, Legacy, Stewardship and Transparency, at the heart of what we do with a commitment in all aspects of our business to manage and continuously improve our environmental and social responsibilities effectively, through all our collective actions.
Sustainability Engagement
Our Sustainability framework is centred on our five sustainability pillars and we understand that in order to meaningfully progress our sustainability agenda we must drive improvement across all pillars. The importance of excellence across all pillars was highlighted as we embarked on engagement with investors, proxy advisors and sustainability rating agencies during 2022.
We are proud to have improved our external sustainability ratings during 2022. We are delighted to have achieved an outstanding score from Sustainalytics, ranking us in the first percentile (out of 636) of global healthcare companies and the third percentile (out of 15,634) of all companies rated by Sustainalytics globally. We also increased our MSCI rating from an ‘A’ to ‘AA’ during the year and increased our CDP rating from a ‘C’ to a ‘B’. This continuous improvement is really important to us at Uniphar and we believe these scores are testament to our focus across all of our sustainability pillars and demonstrate that sustainability has always been at the heart of how we operate our business.
Our Sustainability Pillars
Uniphar have identified five strategic pillars that define our approach to sustainability.
The following are those areas deemed most critical for Uniphar and those where we are currently measuring KPIs or intend to do so in the future:
Sustainable Development Goals
Uniphar fully endorses the UN Sustainable Development Goals (“SDG”) and we consider the following goals to be the ones where we can make the most significant contribution:
Sustainability Framework
Sustainability governance and oversight was a key topic for our Board and Executive Leadership Team during 2022. In early 2023, the Board resolved to expand the remit of the Nominations & Governance Committee to include sustainability oversight and the Committee was renamed the Nominations, Governance and Sustainability Committee. The Committee will be supported in its work by the Sustainability Council which has been in place across the business since 2020. The Group has appointed a number of working groups and ‘Green Teams’ across the business to drive the sustainability and environmental agenda and initiatives locally in each division.
