'Exciting and illuminating': MBA Climate Boot Camp energises new students

Another student maintained: ‘I have loved this. I come from a sustainable background. It is so good to have experts talking about this – a little bit controversial, perhaps – but that’s really good.’

As an introduction to Oxford, the students said, the camp had been inspiring. The talks from across the University had been inspirational and, one said, they were revealing in terms of the cross-disciplinary nature of the institution – and the opportunities that presented, in terms of being exposed to international leaders in engineering, science, climate – as well as all the other subjects, through events such as this but also through Colleges and being part of the University.

An Oxford MBA is much more than business. One student laughed: ‘I am going to be attending a lot of lectures.’

Addressing the MBA students, Professor Allen insisted they, as future business leaders, will be key to driving the necessary change. In a 90-minute talk, amid a flurry of questions, the 'physicist behind net zero' explained what it will take to stop global warming and said every year that action is put off is a real problem. 

Professor Allen maintained, alongside emissions reductions and restoring our biosphere, we need engineered solutions which can remove CO2 permanently out of smokestacks and back out of the atmosphere and store it back underground. Carbon capture technologies will be essential to get rid of the CO2 that ‘we cannot afford to dump, or leave, in the atmosphere’.

While explaining the action needed by government and business, Professor Allen added: ‘We have to stop fossil fuels from causing global warming before the world stops using fossil fuels.’

He reassured the students, who were eager with questions: ‘It is entirely achievable.’

Closing the boot camp on Monday afternoon, Paul Polman also emphasised that business leaders have a key role to play in driving solutions: ‘This is bigger than the Industrial Revolution and it will not be easy. People are interested in keeping the status quo…you need to be part of the force for change. Climate action is not just a nice to have.’

While taking the students through his long career in business and in international climate discussions, he added: ‘There is no debate anymore [as to whether there is such a thing as climate change]. The question is not if we have a problem but what we do about it.’

Explaining that he had originally wanted to be a priest and then a doctor, doing Economics at university had been a fall back for the highly successful business executive. But, urging the students to be responsible and effective leaders, he said: ‘I have always felt, business should be a force for good.’

Mr Polman added: ‘Our planet is at a tipping point… by the end of the decade, one billion people will not be able to live where they are. We are breaking our planet boundaries…we need to change the economic system.

‘As long as we value a tree that is dead more than when it is alive, we are in trouble.’

Talking about the need for business to take action, he said: ‘If you don’t bring the humanity back into business, it will not work…you cannot be a sustainable company of you are not sustainable.’

Mr Polman maintained: ‘It is our duty to put ourselves at the service of others. The role of the CEO is to work on the forest, not in the forest.’

But, he concluded by saying that sustainability should not lead to bad business: ‘You have to deliver profits. This is not an excuse.’

Although the boot camp is over for the year, the climate crisis and sustainability is a core issue for the School, which we are very proud was named earlier this year by the Financial Times as a double winner in its first global Responsible Business Education Awards. The School won in both the overall ‘Best Schools’ and the ‘Academic Research’ categories.

We are committed to highlighting the need for the business world to take action and to bring climate onto the business agenda. We have also launched impactful partnerships to collaborate on important environmental issues, among them our global Climate Change Challenge Competition for high school students, which saw applications from students across 47 countries. And recently, we had school students from around the world in Oxford on our inaugural Future Climate Innovators Summer School.

This year’s boot camp, created a solid foundation of core climate literacy for this year’s MBA cohort. Drawn from 24 sectors and 58 nationalities, they will take these insights into all their core courses and electives throughout their year at Oxford, and from here out into their future world of work.