The Business of Climate Change
A Green Edge conversation with Professor Martin Siegert, co-director of the Grantham Institute for Climate Change and Environment at Imperial College, London.
MSc Climate Change, Management & Finance is a one-year programme operated by the Imperial College Business School in partnership with the Grantham Institute for Climate Change and Environment. Now into its sixth cohort, student numbers on the programme have increased year on year, from 45 in 2015/16 to 95 this year. There are close to 1000 applicants this time around, with the split in student intake being around one third from the UK, one third from the EU and one third from outside. Professor Martin Siegert, co-director of the Grantham Institute, tells us, “we're delighted by the demand for the programme, especially from overseas - it's become very competitive to gain a place”.
Appointed in 2006 as Head of the School of Geosciences at Edinburgh University, Martin worked with the university’s business school to set up the Edinburgh Centre for Carbon Innovation. Moving to Imperial in 2014 - at which point the Grantham Institute had been in existence for about five years - Martin and his co-director at that time, Joanna Haigh, set up a strategic plan that expanded the Edinburgh focus on carbon management and into the wider areas of climate finance, climate change and business. Martin pitched the idea to the Dean of the Business School at that time, Anand Anandalingam: “I do remember going to see him and thinking it's actually quite an important meeting, if we come out of this and he doesn't want to work with us, it's a bit difficult, actually. But I didn't have to say anything. He took on board what we were trying to do and saw the opportunity immediately”.
About the MSc Climate Change, Management & Finance programme
Today, the MSc has the highest employability rate - 95% three months after graduation - of all the Imperial College Business School programmes. A large proportion of graduates move into investment roles, with a number also being take up by NGOs like WWF. Programme partners include financial firms with ethical portfolios like Impax and Baillie Gifford, and the Advisory Board, set up at the beginning and consisting of 12 different people from 12 different sectors, still works closely with the programme. But as Martin says, “I still can't believe that most business schools don't have a programme like this. We’ve demonstrated it’s successful, we’ve demonstrated students are fantastic and I suspect it's because of the inertia that's built in to academia. You teach the sort of academic interests of the staff that you have.”
The programme has an emphasis on providing graduates with the interdisciplinary skills required in business on issues relating to climate change and sustainability. Core modules include Financial and Carbon Accounting and Reporting, The Science of Climate Change, Energy Business and Strategy, Risk Management and Climate Change, and Sustainable Management and Strategy, and the programme also includes a summer internship with programme partners, advisory board members and others[1]. Martin is careful to stress that data and quantitative skills are important pre-requisites for the programme, with Data, Tools and Evidence, and Quantitative Methods primers being leveraged through the Business School for this and other programmes.
The programme has innovated over the years, adding climate governance and climate policy. Climate innovation leverages Imperial’s accelerator programme for clean tech startups and exposes students to the idea of climate entrepreneurship. A dedicated climate innovation programme is being planned for students to take their enthusiasm and interest in climate entrepreneurship and gain practical hands-on experience, with the outcome of the programme being the development of a startup. As Martin says, “they won't all be successful, but there are still things you can learn on the journey [and] then we have this ready pipeline of really enthusiastic people, smart ideas which have done a little bit of concept and getting ready and then insertion into the accelerator programme”.
Another big conversation is with Medicine, where planetary and human health is an essential symbiosis and the human health imperative to develop zero carbon / zero pollution has been underappreciated up until now. Eventually, this is a likely to be programme-level subject in its own right.
Sharing and collaborating
We went on to talk to Martin about the potential for using parts of the programme in other parts of education. He feels they could do more in the Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) space, but it’s simply a question of bandwidth. That said, the college runs a MOOC on clean power transitions in middle developing countries, in the realisation that individual countries may not have the expertise and networks, but collectively a lot of knowledge can be shared. At the schools level, Martin is concerned about the way it's being thought about. He believes there is great interest from the pupil perspective in it but not necessarily translated yet into action. “We don't want to freak young kids out about this, and so there's this sort of the balance isn't there. But I think possibly there could be a little bit more emphasis on it”, he says.
One area of great potential benefit is in technical and vocational education, where university providers like Imperial with heavy emphasis on STEM (Imperial calls its version STEM-B[usiness]) might team up with those that have more of an emphasis on, say, degree apprenticeships. But this may involve a change in the current mindset whereby universities tend to group around like-minded relationships, as we see in the Russell Group for example. But as Martin says, “Understanding that working with a university provider that's not really a competitor, but actually does a lot of the things that you don't and sort of forming this skills continuum and being aware of each other and having some sort of change might be a really good thing to do”.
One area of university collaboration that is breaking down barriers is the UK COP 26 Universities Network[2]. Starting from small group of universities including Imperial College who talked about how they could offer their services to the COP 26 Office, it quickly opened up to welcome all UK universities and research centres with a passion for climate action. The network grew quickly to over 80 universities and has attracted funding in the form of fellowships from UK Research and Innovation (UKRI). Martin again: “I stand to be corrected, but I can't think of a single example where 80 universities have decided to work together on a mission like this in any area of science and engineering. Usually we're forced to be in competition with each other”.
In summary
Our thanks go to Professor Siegert for giving us his time for this Green Edge post and we hand the floor to him to sum up:
“I think when we look back on it, we've just been just delighted by how it how it's gone. We've got a powerhouse of young, talented people who were trained up and who really want to dedicate the next 20 to 30 years of their career to this challenge. Without our programme, they may not be able to do that. And we've been really pleased to do it. I just remain astonished that it's not replicated. Every Business School has a geography programme. Pretty much every Business School has a maths programme. Climate change is the challenge of our time. And universities claim that they take it seriously. But if they really did, surely programmes like this will be commonplace. And I think this is part of the sort of problem that we have more generally that people say they get it. Determined to take action, but actually when you look at really what they do, they could be doing so much more. And I think this is an example.”
[1] For a full description of the programme, see https://www.imperial.ac.uk/business-school/programmes/msc-climate-change/programme/