Thesis: Climate change is the perfect storm that management consultants are perfectly poised to offer advisory services on. In a warming world full of unknowns, a class of professionals—educated at the best universities and armed with tools and frameworks—are trying to make sense of it. This reflects in the rapidly growing category category consultancy-me.com Boston Consulting Group launches Climate & Sustainability Hub Read more of sustainability and climate-change consultancies and in their booming business with high double-digit high double-digit ESG Insight ESG And Sustainability Consulting Space To Swell To Record $16bn In Next Five Years Read more growth. From the Big Three (McKinsey & Co., Bain & Co., and Boston Consulting Group) and the Big Four (PwC, Deloitte, KPMG, and EY) to various boutique outfits, businesses and governments can’t have enough of sustainability advice.
Such commercial services extend the shroud of secrecy, a lack of disclosures, and a business-model-driven constraint for collaboration to climate consulting as well.
Social-impact and strategy-consulting firm Dalberg Global Development Advisors’ global managing partner Gaurav Gupta, who started the firm’s Asia business out of Mumbai 14 years ago, has a Counterthesis: Make climate consulting open access. In an advocacy project for the UN Secretary General and the World Bank, a Dalberg team has shown that creating digital public goods in the climate space has a 32X return on investments.
|
“Professional services are increasingly being like oil companies”
You know that Total [the French petroleum major] is now Total Energies. If you see a poster of Total, do you see oil? No. In the case of BP [British Petroleum] as well, all of its posters were solar, even when renewables were a tiny part of its business.
So when professional-services firms talk about themselves on LinkedIn, Twitter, or other such platforms, it’s only the impact projects they discuss. No one says, ‘Hey guys, we just completed a cost-cutting exercise. Or, we just did a post-merger integration’. And yet, that’s like most of their work.
Consulting brings huge value, and it’s great that [climate consulting] is going on. I think consulting really comes into its own when you’re dealing with a world of unknowns. We do fast decision-making and quick pattern recognition, and with climate, right now, we need to do exactly that.
But every crisis has a different nature. And climate change is a crisis that you might have to deal with differently from, say, a functioning market, where I’m helping my client compete with your client.
So, what is the ethical approach to delivering services in a situation of crisis?
