Environment Advisor

What do you do and how is it contributing to tackling climate change and achieving Net Zero?

Hi, my name is Emily Winkworth and I work as part of Pfizer, UK's Environment, Health and Safety team. My role is environmental advisor, since Pfizer announced its ambition to go Net Zero. A large part of my role has been educating both our UK and our regional colleagues on what Net Zero actually means and what we have to do to get there by 2040. My role specifically involves both internal and external carbon emission reporting. That includes the requirement to drive down emissions as much as possible to help reduce the effects of climate change. To do this, I work closely with many different teams across the business, such as the UK engineering team, the global health and social impact team, our global environmental health and safety team, as well as many interested colleagues from across all departments, who make our UK colleagues sustainability team.

What does your typical day involve?

So for me, no two days are the same, I can be working on our UK emission strategy or running environmental sustainability awareness sessions for colleagues. Most days do involve a certain amount of data analysis or report writing for either internal or external reporting. I really love that I get to spend a large amount of my time working collaboratively with others, whether that's people within our environment, health and safety team or other folks across the business.

How long have you been in your current role?

I've been in my current role for just under two years now. I graduated in the pandemic from the University of Sussex with a first class degree in geography, and I applied for this role shortly after that. During my first year as environmental advisor, I studied part time towards the IEMA certificate and environmental management, which I passed, meaning that I now hold practitioner level IEMA certification and are now looking at which development opportunity I want to take next to further my knowledge even more.

What one piece of advice would you give to someone seeking a career in the pharmaceutical industry?

So one piece of advice I would give to someone seeking a career in the pharmaceutical industry would be to try and get as much practical experience as possible. I opted to do a placement year as part of my university degree course, which I successfully completed within Pfizer's Environmental Health and Safety Team. This really was invaluable experience which provided the foundation that I needed to complete my final year at university knowing which sector I wanted to go into after. Before my placement year I had no idea what I wanted to do after graduating. This was completely down to the wide range of opportunities that I was offered and that I got involved with during my placement year.