Leadership Talks: Global MBA in Green Energy and Sustainable Businesses
4 April 2022Leadership Talks are a precious added value for BBS Global MBA students. A unique experience for a Master that aims to train the top managers of the future.
Meetings with executives and prestigious business leaders add to the Global MBA classes the personal experience of professionals working at the highest level. This is an extraordinary opportunity for students to listen to opinion leaders with which they can come into direct contact. Students can learn from real cases and experiences from leading companies in their own business areas.
Several meetings have been organized for the Green Energy and Sustainable Businesses Global MBA track. Among them, Peter Wadhams, author of Farewell to Ice, emeritus professor of University of Cambridge and Chairman of Science Committee for Extreme E, with a talk entitled The evidences of climate change effects.
Wadhams discussed the challenging and urgent topic of climate change. An authoritative viewpoint because, in addition to being a writer and lecturer, Wadhams is one of the world’s greatest living experts on sea ice. He is a member of the Royal Geographical Society, the Finnish Academy, and the Arctic Institute of North America.
In the 1970s and 1980s, Wadhams’ submarine explorations collected data showing that climate change in the polar region was happening fast and dramatically. Already in those years, the professor could see the north Greenland ice thinning by 15%. This figure would rise to 40% by the end of the 1990s. In 2012, sea ice-covered 3.4 million km2 of the Arctic Ocean. In the 1970s it was 8 million.
If his research published by Nature in 1990 was unheard scream, the famous Farewell to Ice, in 2017, found a large audience. Leonardo Di Caprio, for Netflix, narrated the documentary Ice on Fire, based on Wadhams’ research. In his BBS talk, he was able to explain how this reduction in polar ice is responsible for the permafrost loosening and the consequent release of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. These gases, mainly carbon dioxide, are among the reasons for global warming and are growing fast enough to actively impact the natural system. This is perhaps even more serious than the climate change, allegedly caused by an asteroid, that led to the extinction of dinosaurs.
Reducing CO2 is one of the main challenges of the future. It is a technological challenge because it is with technical innovation that we will be able to find a sufficiently rapid solution to the disruption that humans have caused to the planet over the last 50 years.
Weather events, Wadhams warned, could become dramatically worse in the next five years. The Arctic ecosystem is the climatic barrier to the planet and keeps the world’s climate in balance. The damage done to this structure is so serious that real disasters can be expected in the very short term: migration from coastal countries due to rising seawater, a reduction in cultivable areas which, combined with population growth, will lead to famine and drought, with all the social and political consequences.
Therefore, the topic of sustainability is not only linked to nature, but also to the survival of the human species itself.
A powerful and highly instructive speech for the participants in the Green Energy and Sustainable Businesses track of the BBS Global MBA, who could hear from one of the most distinguished experts the dramas, the causes, and possible solutions to climate change. A unique and formative experience that is combined with an already rich and highly specialized study program, a hallmark of the BBS Global MBA.
Other Leadership Talks have already been scheduled with leading names in the industry, such as Ernesto Ciorra, Chief Innovability Officer, Enel Group, who will illustrate the Enel case with the talk Innovation as a must towards sustainability: the Enel case; and John De Souza, CEO, and founder of Ample Inc., who will illustrate Ample’s projects with the talk Innovative evs charging infrastructure: the Ample’s solution.
