About

The initiative

Conception

In 2020-2021, ESCP Business School developed a 16h mandatory course on Sustainability for the 800 students of the 1st-year Masters in Management. That course designed under the leadership of Aurélien Acquier and Valentina Carbone is an introduction to extensive sustainability knowledge: planetary limits, climate change, biodiversity loss, Anthropocene, governance, etc.

Considering the central role of energy and its core link with both climate change and the development of our societies, the Energy, Business, Climate & Geopolitics course was designed as a complementary elective 30-hour course for Masters 2 business students by Pierre Peyretou, Alexandre Joly, Aurélien Acquier and Charles Sirot.

Since January 2021, the course has been dispensed in multiple editions and has continued to evolve rapidly. The teachers continuously improve the pedagogical materials to provide courses and workshops as dynamic, interactive and efficient as possible.

This approach has been strengthened with the arrival of Hughes-Marie Aulanier, Auriane Clostre, Eliott Rabin, Sami Labat Tahri, Clara Giraldou and Juliette Leboda.

This website opening the course to the public has been designed and edited by Pierre Peyretou with the support of the ESCP Communication Team.

Statements

Urgency to Educate: 5 Gaps

The Paris Agreement objectives involve an urgent reduction in the amount of energy mobilized by our societies. These topics are only marginally and superficially covered in higher education, especially in business schools ("Student Manifesto for Ecological Wakeup" - Pour un Réveil Ecologique, "Mobilize higher education for climate" - The Shift Project)

In France, experts such as Jean-Marc Jancovici and the Shift Project have brought them to a broader audience. While these contents are essential for understanding the fundamental terms of the energy and climate equation, their huge business implications remain largely uncovered. From the perspective of a business leader:

What are the implications of the Paris Agreement for societies, economies and organizations?
At the micro level, what are the objectives for a company to set in order to conduct an appropriate climate strategy?
Who bears the costs and how do we manage the risks, investments and processes of change needed to adapt organizations?
How should business contribute to sectorial, national and international regulations to design a relevant regulatory framework?

Objectives

Urgency to act

The consequences of climate change make media headlines almost everyday: droughts in France, mega-fires in California, Siberia, Australia & Brazil, heat bubble in India & Pakistan, record temperatures in the Arctic, etc.

Human societies have proved incapable of reacting appropriately to the threat by massively cutting their GHG emissions.

"Aware but Ignorant" vs "Educated and Smart"

Media exposure makes these subjects very difficult to ignore, with more and more people declaring themselves « aware of the problem ».

But most participants whether students or business leaders, turn out to be ignorant of even very basic facts and knowledge when they are tested with short quizzes at the beginning of each session. This has major consequences for the misunderstanding of the gravity of the situation, with a confusion for instance between +5°C temperature change in weather versus the same change in climate, or in the actions undertaken, with declarations such as "We took actions at the office: we sort our waste for better recycling..."

Pedagogy & Empathy

A huge quantity of great pedagogical content has already been available online for several years: the IPCC scientific reports, videos & conferences (Jean-Marc Jancovici Mines course, Le Réveilleur in France), articles & blogs (Wikipedia, Our World in Data, etc.).

Still these domains remain largely unknown in business schools, and more broadly in the business world despite a recent acceleration in their inclusions among considerations.

Furthermore, very little research has been done on "What should we do now?" and "What would you do in the position of that manager?", taking into account business constraints from the standpoint of a decision-maker: profitability, organizational impediments to change, etc.

To overcome these shortcomings, the team attaches great importance to creating or using existing interactive workshops and lectures, like the Climate Fresk, and lists the constraints for multiple company stakeholders in order to recommend appropriate actions.

"Neither moralizing, nor demoralizing"

At the end of the first edition, one student told us that he particularly appreciated the factual and action-orientated approach of the course, which makes it "Neither moralizing, nor demoralizing", in contrast to the lectures he had followed previously on CSR, ecology and the environment. Student and business leader feedback shows that overall climate change & energy challenges are approached through the lens of ethical values or political opinion.

One consequence is that the implementation of actions in favor of GHG reduction are viewed as self-inflicted constraints in an economic environment of "business as usual" where looser constraints apply, leading to competitive disadvantages and additional unnecessary burden. Scientific knowledge, historical data and facts are thus not considered with the vital strategic importance they should be.

Quantify Emissions of Individuals, Companies and Society

Giving a sense of the simple orders of magnitude of the sources of emissions and the associated behaviors is essential to hierarchize relevant actions and implement them at the scales of individuals, organizations and society. For instance, what emissions are avoided by recycling employee waste? By switching a domestic flight into a train journey?

Essential methods & tools such as Company Carbon Accounting, Individual Footprint and the average national GHG footprint are provided. The limits of such tools are also detailed. They are estimations and not in situ measurements: they are based on simple calculations that can be easily manipulated through the choice of perimeters, for instance the extent of indirect emissions calculated in scope 3 is arbitrary, as the emission factors are generic, the activity volumes are approximate, etc.

Identify Business & Climate Antagonisms

The difficulty for companies to reduce their GHG emissions is due to many factors. Some are so core to the business activities that they could be considered "mechanical".

A very large majority of business activities are structured in such a way that business interests and priorities drive increases in GHG emissions: "more revenue, more CO2" (car manufacturers, airline companies, building sector, etc.). The contraposition "Less CO2, less revenue" applies as well, explaining the reluctance of most companies to address climate change.

This is what we call Business & Climate Antagonisms. Identifying them gives usa clearer understanding of the business situation, points tobusiness taboos, and allow us to address them at the appropriate strategic level: this often means completely rethinking the activity and business model of the company. Such an approach, far from being "anti-business", intends to diagnose more objectively the business situation and requires a lot of ambition and innovative spirit from business leaders to overcome them.

Develop Systemic Thinking

In most management domains, the company is placed at the center: strategy, accounting, finance, etc. This approach, very pertinent in certain domains, leads to inappropriate, marginal and sometime counterproductive measures to address climate change and energy issues.

On the contrary, the course opens up a twofold approach and decentralizes the company to reposition it inside a bigger picture starting from the global scale and drawing the implications of scientific knowledge, gradually narrowing things down progressively to the national, sectorial, organizational and individual level.

Framework

Physical fundamentals and planetary limits
Societies: what implications?
Economy: what implications ?
Company & Individuals: what implications?

Next Steps

Deploy & Replicate

Business schools need to invest a lot of resources and time in order to scale multidisciplinary research and education on planetary boundaries.

There are many reasons why ESCP Business School has published the course in open access as Creative Commons:

Give access to the ESCP students who are unable to follow the course (other programs, countries, etc.) as well as teachers (strategy, finance, marketing, operations, HR) and alumni.

Give access to students and teachers of other business schools: the urgency to act is such that collaboration amongst them should be developed to the greatest extent possible.

Give access to external actors such as companies and public organizations. ‍

Spread knowledge on a wider scale, gain insights on experiments conducted in the business world by reinforcing links with alumni, students, professors, administration (ESCP Transition Network)

Promote and enact active collaboration and sharing with other higher education institutions (engineering, agriculture, social science, etc.), and especially with other business schools. Considering the urgency to act, classical competitive boundaries must be radically challenged in order to find collective solutions. Give each actor the opportunity to re-use directly and build on information rather than starting all over again for each actor.‍‍

The great majority of scientific reports (IPCC) and pedagogical content (Climate Fresk, Nos Gestes Climats) which the teachers used to learn and build the course on are free and in open access.

About

The initiative

Conception

Fast-Track on Energy & Climate for Business Students

Students' Growing Demand & Very Positive Feedbacks

Statements

Urgency to Educate: 5 Gaps

1. Climate Objectives vs. Actual Business Transformations.

2. Systemic Thinking vs. Silo Myopia

3. Real-life Tangible Description vs. Abstract Trajectories

4. Ambitious Strategic Business Shifts vs. Management Herd Behavior

5. Eco-anxiety vs. Denial & Cynicism

Objectives

1. Scale Climate & Energy Education

2. Transmit & Build New Skills

3. Prepare for "what's coming"

Next Steps

Deploy & Replicate

Collaboration with a dynamic Ecosystem

Projects on the list