STRATEGY
For hundreds of millions of people across Africa, climate change is a painful reality with unprecedented implications for individuals, organisations and companies. Sherif Kamel , professor of management and dean of the School of Business at the American University in Cairo (AUC), outlines how management education must step up and take charge of this most pressing agenda. With additional input from Peter Tufano , the Baker Foundation professor at Harvard Business School, emeritus dean and professor at Oxford University Saïd Business School and senior advisor at the Harvard Salata Institute for Climate and Sustainability Creating the right climate
frica, the world’s oldest inhabited and second-largest continent, is young in population, rich in resources and massive in geography, with an evolving entrepreneurial space and a growing private sector impact. However, the continent continues to face many challenges related to universal access to infrastructure that cause numerous societal divides, including lack of inclusive development, food crises, water scarcity, poverty, inequality, governance and the level of commercial informality in most of its 54 economies, to mention but a few. Most recently, these challenges were exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic, which severely affected the lives and livelihoods of millions of Africans. Although the region has contributed just three per cent of the world’s greenhouse gases, it will, unfortunately, suffer disproportionately from the consequences of the actions of the world’s richest and most industrialised countries, whose economies have benefited from decades of burning fossil fuels. Developing economies will suffer the most from climate change, given that these equatorial regions will be among the hardest hit by extreme weather and these countries possess far fewer resources necessary to adapt. During COP27, among the concrete takeaways and following extensive negotiations by representatives from around 200 countries, an agreement was reached to establish a new United Nations (UN) loss and damage fund to help the poorer and most vulnerable countries cope with climate issues, including destructive storms, heatwaves, droughts, floods and wildfires and other disasters such as refugees’ migration, helping to save millions of lives in the years to come. While these pledges and commitments are of the utmost importance, they require funding and implementation of the associated mitigation and adaptation‑related strategies remains vital in facing climate change challenges,
26 | Ambition | SEPTEMBER 2023
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