Description
Amram Migdal is the Head of Knowledge at the Institute for Business in Global Society (BiGS), leading efforts to build a strong intellectual community of scholars studying the role business plays in addressing societal issues. He recently began attending a course by professor Gunnar Trumbull. This is the first in an occasional series in which Migdal reflects on how Harvard Business School’s research, teaching, and programming address critical societal issues such as climate change, economic mobility and inequality, AI, and geopolitical instability.
This semester, I’m back in the classroom. I have the privilege to audit Professor Gunnar Trumbull’s Global Climate Change course for second-year MBAs at Harvard Business School. Trumbull, as much as anyone, has been studying how firms are responding to climate change and thinking deeply about how to teach executives about the issue.
The impression I have so far is that business management around climate has changed dramatically over the last decade.
Ten years ago, the world was focused on multilateral agreements and top-down efforts. The aim was to force firms to decarbonize and entice consumers to adopt green products to hit certain global emissions and temperature limits. Developed countries who were “guilty” of historic emissions pledged to underwrite the global transition and help developing countries that were now emitting more.
Today, we are about to exceed the 1.5-degree Celsius Paris Agreement goal and are unfortunately on a path to end up with more than 2.5 degrees of warming. Meanwhile, the top-down agreements and national legislation seeded a renewables market that, at this point, is cheaper to install on a levelized-cost basis than new fossil fuels.