Pascal Soriot of AstraZeneca: ‘The climate crisis is a health crisis’

Soriot says the climate crisis and pollution ‘cost us 7 million to 9 million lives every year’. Photograph: Sophia Evans/The Observer

‘I speak as a healthcare CEO, but also as a nature lover and as a grandfather,” Pascal Soriot, chief executive of Britain’s biggest drugmaker, AstraZeneca, told King Charles III and a select audience during London Climate Week at an event in the gothic grandeur of Guildhall.

While the Covid-19 pandemic led to the loss of 7 million lives globally, Soriot says that the climate crisis and pollution “cost us 7 million to 9 million lives every year”.