Columbia Business School Professors Bruce Usher and Gernot Wagner recently joined us to share their perspectives on COP28, exploring the important discussions and the School’s role in shaping the future of climate education in business schools.
Watch the video above and read the transcript below:
CBS: What is COP28 and why does it matter?
Professor Bruce Usher: COP28, known as the Conference of the Parties, brings together world leaders working on climate change. That includes negotiators, politicians, academics, and businesspeople; anyone who cares about climate change and is interested in avoiding the catastrophic climate outcome. It brings them all together -- this year COP28 is in Dubai -- in the UAE. And the objective of it is to get people to work together to come up with climate solutions that will allow us to quickly and effectively decarbonize the global economy.
CBS: What is the state of the climate today?
Professor Gernot Wager: The stakes are high. Climate change is a lot worse than most of us, most climate scientists, thought not too long ago. The risks and uncertainties, frankly, point in one and only one direction. The more we know, the more the drive to action -- to cut emissions. And that’s the task we face: to speed up this transition. It's phasing down and out fossil fuels sooner rather than later. And it’s figuring out how to make the financing work, how to make the scaling of technologies, to make the whole picture politically, economically, and from the business side of things, work.
CBS: How will Columbia Business School contribute to COP28?
Bruce Usher: We have the opportunity to talk about what we are doing at the School around a specific initiative: the Open Climate Curriculum initiative. This is a platform that we've developed here at Columbia Business School to share academic materials -- essentially course syllabi and other teaching materials on climate change -- with other leading business schools around the world. And so we're bringing together many business schools at COP to sit down and talk about how this platform is being rolled out, how they can participate, and how they can provide input and help us design it. And, ultimately, how we can accelerate. teaching climate change in business schools globally.
Read more about the Open Climate Curriculum.