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Simmons College School of Management
Executive Education
409 Commonwealth Ave
Boston, MA 02215
617-521-3869
execed@simmons.edu

Deborah Merrill-Sands

A Message from Dean Deborah Merrill-Sands


Giving Back: Business and Climate Change

As I write this letter, government representatives from around the world are congregating in Bali for the UN Conference on Climate Change. We are at a tipping point where governments, citizens, and business are all beginning to comprehend the stark implications of global warming for the health of our global economy and society. Al Gore’s Academy Award winning movie, An Inconvenient Truth, and the conferral of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize to Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change raised public awareness and catalyzed a powerful global call to action. Perhaps no other issue reveals more starkly the interdependence between business, society, and the environment. The final report of the International Panel on Climate Change, released in November 2007, forecasts “irreversible changes” in our climate with devastating impact on our global economy and society if we do not take immediate and bold steps to reduce carbon emissions in the next three years.i  If business does not take the lead, its asset base of natural resources will be severely degraded and economic growth will be compromised. Recognizing this challenge, 150 global companies, worth nearly US$4 trillion in market capitalization, signed a petition to be presented in Bali.ii

The petition calls for the creation of “an ambitious, international, and comprehensive, legally-binding United Nations agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.” This framework would provide business with the certainty it needs to cut carbon emissions and “scale up global investment in low-carbon technologies.” The petition calls for a minimum of a 50 percent cut in emissions by 2050 in order to prevent catastrophic global warming. Signatory companies, representing a wide range of sectors, include Ambro Bank, AIG, British Airways, BP, Coca- Cola, E-Bay, Gap, GE, Johnson & Johnson, L’Oreal, Nokia, Pacific Gas & Electric, Shell, Sun Microsystems, and Swiss Re. One of our tenets of “principled leadership,” as we have framed this concept at the School of Management, is that we need to hold ourselves accountable for the long-term impact of our leadership decisions on society and the environment. The issue of mitigating climate change puts this tenet to the test. As organizational leaders and responsible citizens, the single most important action that we can all take today to “give back” to society and future generations is to reduce our individual and our organization’s use of carbon-based sources of energy and the products of forests that sequester CO2.

We need to be systematic and strategic, instituting actions from the simple to the more complex.iii And we need to start today. Examples include:

At the School of Management we are beginning this process. We are building a “green building” which will reduce energy use by 30 percent and use renewable forest products in its construction. We are addressing the business implications of environmental sustainability in our curriculum – both the constraints and the strategic opportunities. We sponsor a chapter of Net Impact, a national MBA student club designed to prepare leaders to use business to improve the world. We have been ranked in the top 100 business schools globally for our attention to the social and environmental impact of business in our teaching and research. We are joining many other business schools by signing the Principles for Responsible Management Education sponsored by the UN Global Compact and the Association for the Advancement of Collegiate Business Education. And we are now taking a hard look at our operational practices to ensure that we are doing everything we can to reduce consumption of carbon-based energy and forest products.

Please join me in committing to giving back as principled organizational and community leaders to raise awareness and catalyze action to reduce the emission of greenhouse gases and mitigate the negative consequences of climate change.

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”

– Margaret Mead, anthropologist

As always, I welcome your feedback and comments at somdean@simmons.edu.

Warm regards,

Dean Deborah Merrill-Sands, Ph.D.

Deborah Merrill-Sands
Dean; Co-founder, Simmons Center for Gender in Organizations
Ph.D., Cornell University

 

i Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Fourth Assessment Report,
http://www.ipcc.ch/ipccreports/ar4-syr.htm
ii P. Spotts, "In Bali, new urgency for a climate change accord,"
Christian Science Monitor, December 3, 2007;
http://www.balicommunique.com/communique.html
iii A. Hoffman, Carbon Strategies: How Leading Companies Are Reducing Their Climate Change Footprint, University of Michigan press, 2007
iv http://www.energystar.gov/
v Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED), http://www.usgbc.org/
vi D. Esty and A. Winston, Green to Gold: How smart companies use
environmental strategy to innovate, create value, and build
competitive advantage. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006.