BGA | BUSINESS IMPACT
65% think their own School’s current performance in working to prevent further climate change is ‘excellent’, ‘very good’, or ‘fairly good’. 56% rated their students as ‘excellent’, ‘very good’ or ‘fairly good’ on the issue. 46% believe they need ‘significant’ funding in order to maximise their Business School’s impact in averting climate change. 8 7% agree that business is capable of finding the solutions to tackle climate change; with two fifths (40%) in strong agreement that this is the case.
and local organisations together with the students to come up with solutions. I think that putting all those different people in the same room is something incredibly valuable that Business Schools can do.’ Frank Wijen, Associate Professor of Strategic Management, Rotterdam School of Management ‘We are in a crisis now, so it is almost an unprecedented opportunity to do something for good. Given the enormous amount of money being poured into companies, what if we included some green strings, let’s say climate mitigation measures, to the aid given to distressed companies? That might really make a difference. I used to be very pessimistic, but I am becoming increasingly optimistic. I think we are moving in the right direction – you can see that renewables are taking off now and that coal [consumption] is going down. This was unheard of even five years ago. At the same time, the speed is not enough. ‘Within Business Schools, the people we really need to target are the students. We have extremely powerful levers in Business Schools to educate students for good. These are the managers of tomorrow, or in certain programmes, they are already leaders today. These are the people who can make impactful decisions in terms of the allocation of resources. ‘I believe that sustainability needs to be fully integrated into all courses, if you make it into electives then you are preaching to the converted. You need to reach out to the sceptics and more importantly, you need to make it part of business decisions at the most fundamental level, so core decisions around investments, finance and marketing. Unless you duly integrate it into these aspects, then it becomes philanthropy or something good you do around Christmas – but not part of your core activity. It really needs to be part of the curriculum. The question is – how are we going to achieve that? It’s here that I think we are part of an interesting situation, because not all Business School leaders are equally enthusiastic to do it. We need to reach the sceptics.’ KEY FINDINGS from the AMBA & BGA International Climate Change Report, in association with Jyväskylä University School of Business and Economics: 69% of Business School leaders agree that the planet’s climate is changing and think human activity is the main driver of this. 47% say they are ‘not very optimistic’ or ‘not at all optimistic’ about the future of the planet.
Óscar Eduardo Medina Arango, MBA Director, Universidad EAFIT
‘If I look at our university, we have banned first-use plastic, included sustainability courses, and are getting more students enrolled onto these, meaning we have started to have to offer more courses. Another element within the Business School is that we have Urbam, which works on the sustainability of cities, and how they can become more resilient. ‘We can see that students are really taking sustainability into account as part of their thinking and responsibilities in terms of actions. We are not only stating sustainability, but we are also actively pursuing it.’ Hanna-Leena Pesonen, Dean, Jyväskylä University School of Business and Economics ‘It’s 25 years since we first had the [master’s] programme in corporate environmental management. At the start, it was something totally new – a curiosity within Business Schools – and wherever I talked about the programme, people thought it would be a very marginal issue. The number of applicants to that programme has been increasing all the time, and we have very high levels of quality in the applicants – it’s an international programme so we do get applicants from all over the world. ‘I have seen the change within this quarter of a century, from being something very much in the margin. It’s still not mainstream yet but it is something which is much more widely respected and understood in society.’ Louis Hébert, Director of MBA and EMBA programmes, HEC Montréal ‘The space occupied by social issues is becoming increasingly crowded, in that when we talk about social good, we can talk about a variety of different issues within it. From our point of view, you have the issues of CSR, EDI [equality, diversity and inclusion] green strategy, sustainable development and then we add in climate change on top of that. It's funny because recently we had a presentation from the students’ association,
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