HEC Paris at ChangeNOW: "Our mission is to spark a meaningful debate on climate and business"
Academic partner of ChangeNOW for the third year, HEC Paris has actively participated in this event, which has become a global reference for climate solutions. But this year, HEC launched a broader debate by highlighting the role of business schools in climate leadership, as Fernando Diaz Lopez, Director of the Climate and Earth Center at the S&O Institute, explained to HEC Inside.
Why does HEC take part in ChangeNOW?
ChangeNOW convenes people who are interested in being agents of change. As a school with an ambitious sustainability plan, it is important to walk the talk, so we want to partner with entities and events that help us to be part of that transition towards real sustainability and climate action. ChangeNOW is a natural step towards creating and contributing to a momentum with doers and change makers. It is particularly attractive for students and recent graduates to meet peers, listen to inspirational speakers who are young and active in the job market, to see which potential employers are part of the transition.
Why is this edition particularly important?
What I perceive is that ChangeNOW is really becoming an international actor, an emblematic event at the Grand Palais in Paris. For the first time, ministers of state will be discussing the progress made in the ten years since the Paris Agreement. This year we are bringing in film directors, because we need to mainstream climate action and the power of creative media in steering behavioral change for good is immense. Our alumni from HEC Transition are organizing a pre-screening of Legion 44, a documentary by Leila Conners about carbon removal solutions – a polarizing topic! We were very active on Thursday 24 and Friday 25, we had a panel discussion with François Gemenne, a networking lunch, an entrepreneur pitch, as well as the presentation of our partner Nexans' circularity strategy, always with the ambition of inspiring others. ChangeNOW is really our second event this year with the Business Schools for Climate Leadership partnership, after the Davos summit, during which we brought together C-level executives under the topic of sustainability skills and jobs. Talking to inspirational corporate actors that show how you can become a climate champion and still make a living in a decent way, as is the case with cosmetics company Weleda for example, all this gives us the sense that we are starting the right conversations. Being part of ChangeNOW is a way of expanding this, of continuing to carry the message about the opportunities and responsibilities of business schools in climate leadership.
Can you tell us about HEC's role within the Business Schools for Climate Leadership (BS4CL) partnership?
BS4CL was created with 7 other top European business schools: London Business School, Cambridge Judge Business School, Saïd Business School at Oxford University, INSEAD, IMD, IE and IESE. Eloïc Peyrache, our dean, is the chairmanthis year and I am the co-leader of the executive team. We found that climate leadership was a pressing topic but also an opportunity to rally together our schoolstowards a common goal that could help in influencing our ecosystems. If we manage to increase the level of climate leadership just by 10 percent, in 8 top European business schools, then we can be changemakers and really help to accelerate this climate transition, especially in the coming months.
How can business schools help with climate solutions in the coming months?
The broader context is that it is the beginning of the 7th assessment cycle of the IPCC, with the process to select authors for its reports. As a reminder, the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) does not produce original knowledge, it provides an assessment of the state of the knowledge to inform policymakers. Among the authors (and François Gemenne was one of the IPCC authors during the 6th cycle) scientists and NGOs are well represented, but the voice of business schools is underrepresented – yet there is knowledge generated here. We are hoping to be able to contribute to the coming cycle in one way or another.
I also mention this because the IPCC will produce two special reports in addition to its main report: one on carbon dioxide removal (CDR) technologies and carbon capture utilization and storage (CCUS) and one on climate change in cities and regions. At the S&O's Climate and Earth Center we have developed a roadmap with a focus on business and climate, and precisely on decarbonation, and on adaptation and resilience. The Nexans chair of Orchestrating Sustainable Business Transformation with focus on decarbonation has just published an amazing teaching case. Our Deeptech Centre is running a carbon removal ventures track in the Creative Destruction Lab funded by Xprize, a US-based foundation looking at creating a massive-scale impact with its programs to remove tons of carbon from the atmosphere. Jointly, we are now planning a white paper on business models for carbon removal.
Regarding adaptation in cities and regions, we have two projects funded by Horizon Europe, the first project is due to begin in September. HEC Paris leads a consortium of climate scientists to develop outcome indicators on climate resilience, not just data about rainfall or fires, but what it means for me, for my house, my business, and what multidisciplinary solutions we can implement. The second project Pathways2Resilience/P2R is part of the EU mission on climate adaptation and will help a third of the European population have climate adaptation plans in place, with local governments and authorities implementing a transformational climate transition approach.
So we really want to become a reference in Europe, raising our scientific profile, with our faculty, with our experts, to better understand the role of business in climate solutions, and pushing the boundaries to collaborate with the European Environmental Agency and with the IPCC.
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