Talk by Marco Duso | Partner in Climate, BCG

Last week, 110 Durham students and staff attended a talk and Q&A hosted by Durham Climate Society with Marco Duso, Partner in Climate and Sustainability at the Boston Consulting Group and part of the founding team for the BCG centre for Climate & Sustainability. He is also the Co-Founder of BCG Green Ventures - a dedicated team for investing in and scaling sustainable businesses to drive climate action and innovation. Marco is also a former World Economic Forum fellow. BCG are currently the exclusive consulting partner for COP27.

“Be an agent of transformational change”

Duso champions being an agent of transformational change, as an individual and in a corporate capacity. He emphasised that we should conceive of such change as an opportunity instead of a challenge. Individual focus has too often been on sacrifice and corporate focus has too often been on cost when both can be understood as opportunities for long-term growth. Delay in climate action often comes from it being misconceived as necessary but fruitless change. On a corporate scale, he stresses that this systemic shift toward sustainability offers great value, as evidenced by the fact that there are now over 60 climate tech Unicorns. He urged companies to embed sustainability into every level of strategic decision making. On an individual level, actions like reducing meat consumption offer numerous health benefits as well as environmental and ethical ones. Certainly though, there is a great degree of sacrifice necessitated by action to combat climate change. He suggests that the only way to resolve this is to align both the incentives of people and companies, promoting the monetary and social value that sustainable changes can bring to businesses in the long term. He encouraged students looking for graduate roles to pick a trend instead of a career, one that will retain its relevance and opportunity, emphasising ‘it is a privilege to work in climate’.

“Embed sustainability into every level of strategic decision making”

Duso also spoke about the urgent need for material climate action. The Climate Crisis is the world’s only finite problem and he called for rapid rather than incremental change. He encouraged more disruptive action from young people to force action from politicians engaging in insufficient, incremental reform. He spoke about the need for a shift in our systems of measurement; currently companies work from profit and politicians work from GDP, however, he endorses the use of climate impact as a new, necessary metric.

“It’s a privilege to work in climate”

Durham Climate Society would like to thank Marco for such an insightful talk, and SixDegrees and Durham University Women in Business for partnering with us. Our next event will be on Thursday 17th November with the founders of Tred, a green debit card enabling users to track, reduce and offset their carbon footprints through their spending. Thank you very much to everyone who attended, and please look out for future events on our social media.