At Novo Nordisk, we focus on creating lasting value for society and our business with a strong commitment to our triple bottom line: our financial, social and environmental responsibility. Building on the results of our double materiality assessment (DMA), the Sustainability statement outlines prioritised topics and other material sustainability topics to demonstrate this commitment.
Through our disclosures, we endeavour to ensure transparency across all sustainability matters deemed material to Novo Nordisk, including the ways in which we impact people and society as a pharmaceutical company, both positively and negatively.
The Sustainability statement includes information on relevant processes, policies, actions, performance metrics and targets in accordance with the requirements of the European Sustainability Reporting Standards (ESRS).
Novo Nordisk has updated the Double Materiality Assessment (DMA) in 2025 taking point of departure in the ESRS standards across Social, Environment, and Governance (see illustration below).
The DMA resulted in four ’Prioritised topics’, which are those that are 1) double-material, 2) have scored the highest in our DMA and 3) are linked to our Strategic Aspirations. This is where we focus our sustainability efforts and where we can make the greatest difference for our patients, employees, the environment and our business.
Moreover, we have 'Other material topics', which are those that are double-material (E3 and G1) or single-material (E4, E2 and S2) related to sustainability commitments beyond our strategic topics, where we take targeted action to enable a resilient, responsible and sustainable business.
We aim to support patients, society and vulnerable populations by enhancing quality of life. In 2025, we reached an all-time high of 45.6 million people with obesity and diabetes care products. The number of vulnerable patients reached with our diabetes products decreased by 15% compared to 2024, due to reduced insulin tender sales caused by portfolio consolidation. We remain committed to improve access and affordability via targeted programmes and innovations, while ensuring patient protection. In the US, we increased our efforts through NovoCare®, direct-to-patient offerings and telehealth partnerships. For prevention, we advanced early intervention for childhood overweight and obesity in urban areas with UNICEF's programmatic activities benefitting more than 468,000 children.
We continued our focus on being a sustainable employer in a year where Novo Nordisk launched a company-wide transformation to simplify the organisation, speed up decision-making, reduce cost and redirect resources towards obesity and diabetes growth opportunities. We maintained a focus on diversity and inclusion and launched a new strategy to leverage employee differences and foster an engaged workforce. We monitored the gender distribution across leadership levels and observed that the transformation process had minimal effect. We remain committed to protecting the health and safety of our employees and maintained a stable performance in 2025. Targeted awareness training and new construction safety standards for expansion and construction sites were implemented to safeguard employees and further enhance our performance.
We remain committed to reduce our plastic footprint and our overall environmental footprint, with targets to reach zero scope 1 and 2 emissions by 2030, and a 33% reduction of scope 3 emissions by 2033. We aim to reach net zero GHG emissions by 2045. In 2025, scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions increased by 19% as expected due to planned expansions and increased energy use at new and growing production sites. We are continuing the advancement of key decarbonisation levers to stay on track towards our committed targets. We also made tangible progress by sourcing more than 10% of our glucose from regenerative agriculture to reduce scope 3 emissions.