Abhijith Magal L, Founder: Climate, Health and the Widening Gap

Abhijith Magal L, founder of Syntropy Earth

I spent nine years across two global pharmaceutical multinationals, seven roles, individual contributor through to people management. Brand and commercial work across more than 40 markets, alongside executive leadership on brand lifecycles, milestone launches and global campaigns. Then health equity and social responsibility at a corporate foundation, building patient wellness hubs in underserved communities and working directly with the WHO-Foundation and UNICEF.

I am not a commentator on this work. I have managed launches carrying more than a dozen cross-functional workstreams, built first-of-their-kind pharmacy and trade activation across 1,500 outlets, negotiated commercial partnerships, and built the measurement systems that carry programmes through board and regulatory scrutiny. When I talk about access, I mean pharmacy channels, cold chains, last-mile distribution and the operational reality of getting care to people.

And the work that changed how I think was not in a boardroom. It was in the field, watching patients with chronic disease make hours of round trips for a three-minute consultation, struggle to get medicines on time, and miss treatment cycles, not because the medicine did not exist but because their most basic needs were never met.

The same heatwave, the same flood, lands on a tier-one life and on someone already trying to make ends meet as two entirely different worlds.

That gap is what I could not put down. It is also, I think, the most badly served problem in corporate social responsibility: enormous budgets moving every year, real work happening on the ground, and almost no ability to say what any of it changed. Programmes designed around what is easy to report rather than what is hard to fix.

So Syntropy Earth builds programmes with the commercial discipline that makes them survive, and not just the conviction that they matter. I run every engagement myself. There is no delivery team the work gets handed to once the proposal is signed.

Background

Nine years, two global pharmaceutical multinationalsSeven roles, individual contributor through to people management

More than 40 marketsBrand lifecycles, milestone launches and global campaigns with executive leadership

Health equity and social responsibilityPatient wellness hubs in underserved communities, led at a corporate foundation

WHO-Foundation and UNICEFDirect collaboration on health equity and sustainability programmes

MBA, Marketing · MBA, Leadership and StrategyBachelor of Engineering, Mechanical

Bengaluru, working globallyFounder-led practice, every engagement run personally

The evidence stopped being the hard part. Acting on it is no longer optional.

Heat is pulling people out of work and out of care. Floods break the routes medicine travels and the facilities people arrive at. Air quality raises the baseline load that every health system and every employer already carries. None of this is a forecast, and none of it is filed under climate inside most organisations. It arrives as a bad quarter, a supply shock, a brutal summer, a spike in absence.

Meanwhile the obligations have hardened. Mandated spend has to be defended. Assurance has arrived. Head offices have set dates. Duty of care has stopped being a policy question and started being a liability one.

Which means the choice is no longer whether to act, but whether what you build will hold. That is the whole job.

Most people have never heard the word.
That's the point.

Entropy is the slide toward disorder, the tendency of any system left alone to break down. It is also the word the climate conversation has quietly run on for decades: loss, decline, collapse, things falling apart.

Syntropy is the opposite principle. Coined by the mathematician Luigi Fantappiè in 1941, it describes what living systems do: organise, build, grow more complex, hold their shape against the pull toward disorder. A forest does it. A body does it. A well-run health system does it. Neither word is metaphor. What separates a living system from a dead one is the capacity to build order faster than it loses it.

That is the whole idea behind this company. Climate change is a healthcare story, and the healthcare story does not have to be told as decline. Slowing the damage is the smaller half of the job. The larger half is building systems that hold, and grow, under pressure. That is what Syntropy Earth is for.

Read the thesis →

The gap between commitment and care is widening. Climate is widening it fastest.

Most people have never heard the word.
That's the point.

A budget that needs a programme. A commitment with a date on it. A launch that has to land. Let's talk.

Most people have never heard the word.That's the point.

A budget that needs a programme. A commitment with a date on it. A launch that has to land. Let's talk.

Most people have never heard the word.
That's the point.