BGA | BUSINESS IMPACT
T he climate emergency is never far from news headlines, and the pressure is mounting on the business community to take fast, decisive and effective action. But, what are Business Schools doing to help alleviate climate change – and what more could still be done? In the March 2021 edition of Ambition , we revealed the findings of the AMBA & BGA International Climate Change Report , in association with Jyväskylä University School of Business and Economics. In its survey of 597 senior leaders at Business Schools across the world, the report found that 88% believe that their Business School has at least some responsibility to tackle climate change. However, only 3% of this same sample are of the belief that their Business Schools’ current efforts in addressing climate change are ‘excellent’. It is therefore clear that leaders see the need for significant improvements at their institutions. The report provides a snapshot into the views and beliefs of senior members of the Business School professional community worldwide, on the topic of climate change. Eager to expand on its findings and further explore some of its key themes, AMBA & BGA gathered together a group of nine experts in the field of sustainability in business education. Over the following pages are highlights from the ensuing conversation, which detail some of hurdles currently being faced and insights into potential solutions that have been found. Jennifer Goodman, Associate Professor, Audencia Business School ‘When I work with my students on sustainability, they always ask me if I am optimistic that we can deal with climate change. I still haven’t figured out the best way to answer that.
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‘We have a big responsibility to our students because they need optimism and hope to work on sustainability challenges, but at the same time we have to sit with this uncomfortable reality that it’s going to be difficult, and I think they are very aware of that. Students are really asking themselves what they are going to do next. I think there is a lot of frustration about what they can actually do when they are faced with this urgency. ‘One of the key roles that Business Schools can play is bringing lots of different stakeholders into the same room. For our Audencia Plastic Forum and Critical Marketing Hackathon, we invited guests from business and NGOs into the same room for a discussion. The students could interact with the panel and put together a more complete picture of the problem. I feel that we often try to get students to come up with innovative solutions, but they don’t have enough time to get into the problem, and to understand all the complexities. We need to include a wide range of different stakeholders in order to move forward on sustainability challenges. We can’t get where we need to be by working alone. Business Schools have this opportunity to bring people together. Audencia is a Business School, not a university, but we collaborate with an engineering school and an architecture school. In our CityLab project, we look at different challenges that the city of Nantes is facing and then bring the different schools, businesses
‘One of the key roles that Business Schools can play is bringing lots of different stakeholders into the same room’
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