Sustainability

Pierre Peyretou’s advice for good training on sustainability issues

For our white paper, Sustainable Transition, the expertise to develop to transform your company, produced with AXA Climate, Pierre Peyretou, ESCP Affiliate Professor, Energy-Business, Climate & Geopolitics, agreed to share his expert eye on the assimilation of sustainability-related concepts.

“To understand sustainability issues, we must first take the time to learn to understand better and then act.

Students and participants in ongoing education courses claim to be increasingly “aware” of environmental issues, but often they’re no less ignorant. With small quizzes, we observe that the understanding of the mechanisms is still poor: “Who knows what a Remaining Carbon Budget is?”, “+5°C is more serious than +2°C: yes, but what are the differences?” This poses real problems for implementing relevant action plans: for example, they don’t have the correct degrees of magnitude for carbon footprint emissions regarding cars and planes.

Good news: with curiosity, desire, and determination, everything can be taught! This is initial training through courses, diversified internships, and double majors, which include engineering, agronomy, urban planning schools, etc. It’s also true in companies with the fast development of continuous training.

The fields of climate, energy, biodiversity, and natural resources are vast and often technical. To better understand them, you need to devote time to them. A single 2-hour training session is not enough: it’s a real investment.”