The CPHI Sustainability Summit - Where Conversation Becomes Collaboration

The Report Was Never the Destination - “The future of pharmaceutical sustainability won’t be shaped by individual organisations working in isolation. It will be shaped by partnerships, shared expertise and the willingness to work differently. This is the purpose of both the CPHI Sustainability Report 2026 and the inaugural CPHI Sustainability Summit. Real progress begins when conversation becomes collaboration.” Silvia Forroova - Director, Partnerships & Sustainability, Informa Markets.

Over the past few months, one question sat quietly behind every conversation we had while producing the CPHI Sustainability Report 2026. Not whether sustainability matters. That debate has been settled. And not whether pharmaceutical innovation will continue. Anyone looking at the pace of progress in AI, biologics, precision medicine, and advanced manufacturing would struggle to argue otherwise. The real question is something altogether more challenging.

How do we make all of these things work together?

Consider: every breakthrough creates another dependency. Every new therapy demands increasingly intricate manufacturing. Every AI model relies on greater energy capacity and more sophisticated infrastructure. Every sustainability target depends upon decisions made somewhere else in the value chain.

As the science continues to accelerate, the systems surrounding it are having to play catch-up. And that became one of the defining themes of this year’s report. Contributors arrived at the same conclusion from varying perspectives: innovation no longer happens in isolation. Neither does sustainability. And it’s a realisation that changes almost everything.

For years the pharmaceutical industry has been extraordinarily good at bringing together scientific expertise. Today it has to become equally good at bringing together procurement, manufacturing, technology, sustainability, regulation, finance, and commercial leadership. These disciplines are no longer running in parallel. They are converging. The industry has entered an era where some of its biggest breakthroughs won’t come from discovering entirely new technologies. They’ll come from connecting existing ones better. Connecting people better. Connecting organisations better. This is why collaboration has become such an overused word. But perhaps that’s because it has never mattered more.

The CPHI Online 2026 Sustainability Report set out to understand where the industry is today from the perspective of a cross-section of industry stakeholders. What it uncovered was an industry asking increasingly sophisticated questions, such as:

-       How do we reduce emissions without compromising patient safety?

-       Can AI accelerate discovery without creating entirely new environmental pressures?

-       How do we make sustainability visible early enough to influence design decisions rather than simply measure outcomes afterwards?

-       How do procurement teams become drivers of innovation rather than gatekeepers of cost?

-       Who ultimately pays for change?

The interesting thing about these questions is that they are no longer being asked by sustainability professionals alone. They are becoming questions for the C-suite, manufacturers, commercial teams, and operations.

Which is precisely why the conversation needs to move somewhere different. This makes the inaugural CPHI Sustainability Summit feel significant.

Not because it promises easy answers… but because it has been designed around the difficult conversations. Look closely at the programme and something quickly becomes apparent. This isn’t an agenda built around presentations or keynote speakers. It’s built around participation. The language tells its own story:

Mapping.

Challenge.

Reality Check.

Hack the Friction.

Supplier Sprint.

Commitment.

Implementation.

These aren’t conference buzzwords. They’re verbs. Milan is written in the language of people trying to get things done.

It’s no coincidence that procurement will dominate the opening conversations. One of the report’s clearest conclusions is that procurement is no longer simply about purchasing power; it has become one of pharma’s most powerful sustainability levers.

Ximena Stawsky - Supply Chain Head, Core Markets (Europe, Australia, South Korea & Japan), Merck - appears alongside a high-profile panel for Mapping the Supply Chain: Regional Perspectives on Sustainability to discuss regional supply chains, geopolitical resilience, energy security, and Scope 3 collaboration.

Robert Williams - Senior Director, Sustainable Procurement, AstraZeneca - whose observation that “We already have many of the solutions” became one of the report’s defining moments, doesn’t simply repeat that message. He leads delegates into Hack the Friction: Buyer Solutions Lab, turning real challenges into pilot-ready ideas.

Progression matters. The report identifies the friction, and the summit asks what happens next?

One of the report’s clearest conclusions is that sustainability has to move upstream for earlier design decisions, collaboration, engagement, and visibility. Again, Milan will respond not with theory… but with practice.

The workshop From Commitment to Action: Implementing Sustainability at Scale Across the Pharmaceutical Value Chain explores how organisations are aligning procurement teams, laboratories, suppliers and operational leaders around common standards; moving sustainability from aspiration towards day-to-day decision making.

Elsewhere, AstraZeneca’s BridgeHouse Initiative explores how new technologies can move more quickly from promising innovation to practical adoption across the wider industry.

The emphasis throughout isn’t simply innovation. It’s implementation. It’s a distinction that feels increasingly important because perhaps the biggest misconception surrounding sustainability is that the pharmaceutical industry lacks ideas. It doesn’t. The report demonstrates this repeatedly.

Whether discussing AI, green chemistry, procurement, manufacturing or clinical development, contributors consistently highlighted innovation already taking place. The challenge is rarely invention. More often, it’s adoption, scaling, and alignment. Getting multiple organisations moving in the same direction. It’s a very different problem and one that cannot be solved by individual organisations working alone.

Green chemistry provides another perfect example.

The report explores how green chemistry increasingly belongs in R&D itself rather than being bolted on afterwards. As Kami Krista - Founder & CEO, Elio Earth says: “It is becoming essential to embed sustainability into today’s R&D process.”

In Milan, Isamir Martinez - Assistant Director, ACS Green Chemistry Unit, American Chemical Society - chairs a workshop titled Practical Tools and Metrics for Greener and More Sustainable API Synthesis. The intention is to move the conversation into practical territory; equipping scientists with tools, metrics, and real-world approaches to greener API synthesis. It’s a reminder that sustainability isn’t becoming another reporting exercise. It is becoming part of how better science is designed.

The same applies to clinical research.

The report repeatedly challenges the industry to think in systems rather than silos. Not simply reducing emissions for their own sake, but asking how sustainability can improve resilience, efficiency, and long-term value.

Implementation sounds somewhat less exciting than innovation, less disruptive than AI, and less transformative than cell and gene therapies. Yet implementation is where almost every ambitious idea ultimately succeeds or fails.

The challenge is different now: how do promising ideas become standard practice? How do isolated successes become industry norms? How do organisations move beyond pilot schemes and proof of concepts towards adoption at scale? These are fundamentally collaborative questions. These questions demand that scientists talk to manufacturers. Procurement teams working alongside suppliers. Sustainability specialists to influence product design before critical decisions become locked in. They require commercial realities to sit comfortably alongside scientific ambition.

Sustainability is no longer simply about generating better ideas, it is about implementing them better. And implementation cannot happen in isolation.

This important thread extends through The Business Case for Low Carbon Clinical Trials: What This Looks Like in Reality led by Dr. Fiona Adshead - Chair, Sustainable Healthcare Commission, and Stefan Lutzmeyer - Senior Consultant, Thought Leadership, IQVIA. The Milan workshop explores the business case for low-carbon clinical trials, shifting the conversation away from compliance and towards practical operational change.

The shift in emphasis from ‘why’ to ‘how’ is subtle, but important.

Why? Because it demands different skills. Different partnerships. Different conversations. And for the industry to move faster, different events.

For decades, CPHI has brought different parts of the pharmaceutical industry together. Scientists have met manufacturers. CDMOs have met innovators. Suppliers have met customers. Ideas have become working partnerships. The Sustainability Summit feels like a natural evolution of that role and not just another stream running alongside the main event, but a recognition that sustainability now cuts across almost everything the industry is trying to achieve like innovation, supply chain resilience, manufacturing excellence, investment and innovation, and better patient outcomes.

Increasingly, they are all part of the same conversation.

Producing the CPHI Online 2026 Sustainability Report left one overwhelming impression. The pharmaceutical industry doesn’t lack ambition or expertise. What it increasingly needs are places where expertise collides.

Where scientists hear procurement leaders. Where sustainability professionals challenge commercial teams - and vice versa. Where suppliers hear directly from buyers. Where difficult questions are welcomed, and not avoided. Where good intentions become workable ideas with owners, timelines, momentum, and accountability.

The report isn’t the conclusion of the conversation. It is the industry’s briefing paper.

Looking at the programme, it is difficult to escape the feeling that the Sustainability Summit has been deliberately designed around the tensions emerging from this year’s report.

If the report captures where the conversation stands today, Milan has been built to explore what happens next. The report was never the destination. It does not conclude the subject and neither will the summit.

The pharmaceutical industry is beginning to solve some of its hardest problems by working in unison. CPHI Milan’s role is to create the conditions in which those conversations, collaborations, and partnerships can happen more often. The invitation is there for anyone who believes the next chapter of pharmaceutical sustainability can only be written together.

The outcomes matter because that’s how industries change: not through isolated breakthroughs alone, but by creating the partnerships that allow good ideas to travel further. As Robert Williams reminds us: “We already have many of the solutions to the challenge. We just need to act.”

Action rarely begins with consensus. It begins with conversation.

Milan is where the next one starts.

---

Discover more about the CPHI Milan Sustainability Summit here.