今日上海
为了低碳未来培养环保人士 - 2023年10月10日
Nurturing climate leaders for low-carbon future
Malaysian student Soo Yu Han, specializing in global environmental leadership at Tsinghua University, shares her experience as a Climate Corps China program fellow at the program’s 10th-anniversary celebration in Shanghai, on Sept 22, 2023.
Soo Yu Han, from Malaysia, is a third-year graduate student specializing in global environmental leadership at Tsinghua University. This past summer holiday saw her work as a fellow of the Climate Corps China program, hosted by the Environmental Defense Fund, an international nonprofit environmental advocacy group founded in 1967.
EDF paired Su with LONGi Green Energy Technology Co Ltd, a leading photovoltaic module supplier in China, where she completed a 10-week internship with the sustainability development team of the company’s brand management department. The placement led the Malaysian student to gain hands-on experience in the PV industry, find her position in the environmental cause, and inspire her to bring her knowledge and experience back to her home country one day.
“Before we started the internship, EDF provided us a three-day intensive training, which involved lectures by industry experts and former fellows, company field trips, and mock carbon markets. It was informative and interactive and helped us fellow interns get to know each other,” Soo said.
During the internship, Soo analyzed the carbon footprint of the products manufactured by LONGi’s main competitors. “This helped LONGi better understand its performance and competitiveness in the industry,” Soo said.
The environmental engineering student was also tasked to pinpoint the company’s challenges in reducing its PV modules’ carbon footprint to meet the importing countries’ requirements.
Soo found that the upstream supply chain was the most significant contributor to the carbon footprint of the PV modules. To address the issue, she proposed a preliminary framework, including empowering suppliers to enhance their carbon reduction awareness and skills, adding requirements regarding carbon reduction to LONGi’s supplier code of conduct, and providing carbon reduction support to critical suppliers to ensure the goals are met.
The intern’s proposal, boasting high application potential, won the approval of LONGi’s sustainability development team, which is considering incorporating it into the company’s existing supply chain emissions reduction scheme to reduce the carbon footprint of its products, as well as improve its environmental, social and governance performance.
“That LONGi’s considered my proposal is a huge recognition of my work as an intern, and I am very looking forward to seeing it implemented,” Soo said.
Planning to build a career in sustainability, Soo also appreciated the experience shared by colleagues and other fellows and the connections she formed during the program, as she will join the job market soon.
Soo is one of the nearly 200 graduate students from top Chinese universities who have participated in the Climate Corps program, and LONGi is one of over 40 multinational and domestic companies — including Danone, Lenovo, McDonald’s, and Walmart that have hosted the program fellows since it was introduced to China in 2014.
Tom Murray, executive vice-president of EDF Solutions, delivers a keynote speech at the Climate Corps China program’s 10th-anniversary celebration in Shanghai, on Sept 22, 2023.
The Climate Corps China program celebrated its 10th anniversary in Shanghai on September 22, which also marks the third anniversary after China proposed its dual carbon goals — peaking carbon dioxide emissions by 2030 and achieving carbon neutrality before 2060.
“The Climate Corps China program supports these overarching goals. To date, our fellows have helped their host companies in China identify over $130 million in cost-saving opportunities, equivalent to about half a million metric tons of greenhouse gas emission reductions,” said Tom Murray, executive vice-president of EDF Solutions, at the event.
“Moreover, as these fellows continue to ascend in their careers, their impact will continue, helping to lead the way toward a thriving, carbon-neutral future by 2060,” he added.
To meet the ambitious “dual carbon” targets, China put in place a “1+N” policy framework, including a document issued in 2022 by the Ministry of Education urging colleges and universities to cultivate talents urgently needed for carbon neutrality and improve the training quality of students specializing in “dual carbon”-related majors.
It is reported that during the country’s 14thFive-Year Plan period (2021-25), between 555,000 and a million “dual carbon” professionals are in demand.
Climate Corps has been responding to this demand with the vision to “accelerate the transition to a low-carbon future by empowering, connecting, and supporting the leaders of today and tomorrow,” said Murray.
Launched in the US in 2008, Climate Corps is “rooted in a firm conviction: the private sector, with its substantial potential for leadership and innovation, must play a major role in reducing greenhouse gases and unlocking a sustainable future,” said Murray, the program co-founder.
The executive, a longtime corporate sustainability advocate who spearheaded the EDF + Business program for years, said that in figuring out the barriers to progress on climate and clean energy, he and his team found that many companies, even the big global ones that the organization worked with, lacked in the expertise to help them do business sustainably.
“We took that need and married it with the fact that everywhere I go in my travels and work around the world, young people are passionate about making the world a better place, and they look for jobs in that space. This program is helping solve the two needs,” said Murray.
The Climate Corps China program fellows have helped their host companies in China identify over $130 million in cost-saving opportunities, equivalent to about half a million metric tons of greenhouse gas emission reductions.
The program’s first six years in the US bore fruit, leading to its expansion to China.
“It was a huge success in the US. In the first year alone, we found millions of dollars in cost savings for the six or seven companies that participated. And the companies wanted to come back the next year and do more and more,” Murray recalled.
The organization also found that many host companies were multinationals with operations and supply chains in China, and many program fellows, students from top American universities, were international students from China who were eager to bring what they were learning in the graduate programs and through Climate Corps back to opportunities in China.
“It was also important to us because the US and China are both major global economies but also major emitters of greenhouse gases. So it was a natural extension to go to China next so that we could work in two of the geographies most important to solving climate change,” Murray told the China Daily website during a video interview.
“We spend a lot of time making sure that we match the students’ interest and expertise with the companies and projects they’re going to work on because we want both the students and the projects to be successful,” said Murray.
Two teams at EDF work closely to ensure that every Climate Corps summer internship proceeds with a high level of engagement and quality. One team recruits talented fellows from the best Chinese universities and offers them training before they start the internship. The other team recruits leading companies to host the fellows, develops work plans, and supports them throughout the program. An engagement manager also meets with the fellows at the midpoint and in the end to ensure that things are going well.
After running for a decade, the Climate Corps China program has become a launching pad for many fellows into a sustainability career in various sectors.
For example, Qian Li, from the 2021 Climate Corps class, was tasked with managing a project involving factory carbon inventory and enhancing energy efficiency for PMI suppliers during the summer of 2021. Now, she is actively spearheading carbon-neutral project investments at a Fortune 500 company.
Qihui Gao, from the class of 2019, spent her summer at LONGi Solar, where she developed a greenhouse gas emission accounting model and formulated ESG recommendations. Now, she is a negotiator and researcher at the National Center for Climate Strategy and International Cooperation of the Ministry of Ecology and Environment.
Bai Guoqiang, deputy director at the Shanghai Municipal Bureau of Ecology and Environment, speaks at the Climate Corps China program’s 10th-anniversary celebration in Shanghai, on Sept 22, 2023.
“The EDF Climate Corps program has creatively established a platform, enabling companies to tap the expertise of young professionals to move forward projects related to energy conservation and emission reduction and expanding the pool of professionals to help deliver on China’s ‘dual carbon’ goals,” said Bai Guoqiang, deputy director at the Shanghai Municipal Bureau of Ecology and Environment.
In charting the course for the program’s another ten years ahead, Murray said much work is left to do to support China’s commitment to its “dual carbon” goals.
Apart from engaging more companies, the program looks to diversify the participants by opening up more opportunities to international students from the Global South like Soo, ensuring they can take the experience and learning from the program back with them, filling the talent gap in their home countries.
The program will also send more fellows to conduct research in China’s rural areas, helping cut agricultural production emissions and achieve green, low-carbon rural revitalization.
Now running in the US, China, and India (since 2021), the EDF Climate Corps program has recruited more than 1,500 fellows working with over 600 leading companies and organizations, cultivating a network of 2,500 climate leaders and practitioners. Together they have helped identify energy savings worth more than $1.6 billion, the equivalent of over 2.2 million metric tons in carbon emissions.
Representatives from the participating companies of Climate Corps China program attend a roundtable at the program’s 10th-anniversary celebration in Shanghai, on Sept 22, 2023.
Climate Corps China program alumni attend a round-table at the program’s 10th-anniversary celebration in Shanghai, on Sept 22, 2023.
Source: China Daily
