We have just released the latest episode of our podcast, “Environmental Insights: Discussions on Policy and Practice from the Harvard Environmental Economics Program.” In this latest episode, I engage in a conversation with Rebecca Henderson, the John and Natty McArthur University Professor at Harvard University. She shares her perspectives on how large organizations are changing in response to the coronavirus pandemic and global climate change. A full transcript of our conversation is available here.
Rebecca makes her home at Harvard Business School, where she was the founding co-director with Professor Forest Reinhardt of the Business and Environment Initiative. She is also a Research Fellow of the National Bureau of Economic Research, and a Faculty Fellow of the Harvard Environmental Economics Program.
In this podcast episode, we first discuss how the attention given to environmental matters has changed at business schools in the three decades since she received her Ph.D. in Business Economics at Harvard and joined the faculty at the MIT Sloan School of Management, prior to moving on to Harvard Business School.
Henderson’s research and writing explore how organizations respond to large-scale technological shifts, most recently in regard to energy and the environment. This has also given her a special perspective to think about the role of the private sector in responding to the Covid-19 crisis. In this regard, she notes that she is reminded that “when organizations decide they must change, they can change,” pointing to the quick shift to remote work across many sectors, the effort by biomedical firms to speed up supply changes, and the ways in which retail and grocery distribution channels are mobilizing their resources. “You’re seeing profound changes in methods of operation across the economy,” she remarks.
“The potential upside is that this emergency is making it very clear that the stability of the entire community is critical to the success of business,” Rebecca states. “I think the emergency is also highlighting that one needs a strong, effective federal government to deal with problems like this. I think both of those insights could conceivably translate into business pressure for coherent climate policy in ways that could be very helpful.”
“Climate change can seem distant; it can seem invisible. Why should I worry about it? To see the whole economy mobilized when the threat becomes very, very concrete reminds me that, as we think about climate change, we have to find a way to make that threat as concrete as possible. So that’s one thing I take away from the current moment.”
All of this and much more is found in the newest episode of “Environmental Insights: Discussions on Policy and Practice from the Harvard Environmental Economics Program.” Listen to this latest discussion here, where, by the way, you can also find a complete transcript of our conversation.
My conversation with Rebecca Henderson is the ninth episode in the Environmental Insights series. Previous episodes have featured conversations with:
- Gina McCarthy, former Administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
- Nick Stern of the London School of Economics discussing his career, British politics, and efforts to combat climate change
- Andrei Marcu, founder and executive director of the European Roundtable on Climate Change and Sustainable Transition
- Paul Watkinson, Chair of the Subsidiary Body for Scientific and Technological Advice (SBSTA) within the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change
- Jos Delbeke, professor at the European University Institute in Florence and at the KU Leuven in Belgium, and formerly Director-General of the European Commission’s DG Climate Action
- David Keith, professor at Harvard and a leading authority on geoengineering
- Joe Aldy, professor of the practice of public policy at Harvard Kennedy School, with considerable experience working on climate change policy issues in the U.S. government
- Scott Barrett, professor of natural resource economics at Columbia University, and an authority on infectious disease policy
“Environmental Insights” is hosted on SoundCloud, and is also available on iTunes, Pocket Casts, Spotify, and Stitcher.
