HENLEY Business School Africa is in the process of applying for its first post lockdown carbon credits certificate. The school began transitioning to becoming a carbon neutral environment in 2018 as part of its commitment to active corporate citizenship.

As Henley Africa dean and director Jon Foster-Pedley explains: “We have always prided ourselves on practicing what we preach literally, whether it’s the tools we develop and that we teach our students or the aspirations we inculcate in them students, like active corporate citizenship.”

Becoming a carbon neutral environment is a highly intensive process, which involves being audited in terms of carbon emissions and then offsetting these through the purchase of carbon credits. The school works with external carbon consultancy, the Climate Neutral Group as well as carbon offset providers; Joburg Waste to Energy Project and the Wonderbag Project. The carbon neutral project is being led at Henley Africa by general manager Jacques le Roux and senior operations manager Graham Garrard.

As Garrard explains: “for us to get a carbon neutral certificate, we have to calculate our carbon inventory to establish the total annual emissions, which involves monitoring diesel consumption in our generators, electricity use, travel by faculty and staff, water consumption and use of other materials over the course of a year.

“All of this is calculated and we receive a figure in tons per CO2, which represents our carbon footprint. We are then given a list of projects that align with UN’s Agenda 2030 Sustainable Development Goals, which we can choose from to invest in, getting carbon credits in the process that offset our footprint.”

For Le Roux, the journey to create a carbon neutral campus has been an eye-opener for everyone involved in the project.

“We can’t avoid load shedding and running our generators when we are teaching on campus, but there are many other things we can do from stopping providing water in plastic bottles to rather using glass bottles. Recycling bins spread across our campus helps us to manage our waste and improves our consciousness to having an environmentally friendly campus. We can dramatically cut down on our waste if we focus on those low hanging fruits.”

But the greatest change has come from being forced to look at the issue of environmental consciousness from a holistic perspective.

“We have a beautiful campus in Paulshof surrounded by trees, with the Braamfontein Spruit Trail  flowing alongside, and then unfortunately the campus nestled in the incredibly carbon intensive highways running next to us,” he says.

That juxtaposition is at the heart of Foster-Pedley’s passion to re-imagine and redesign campus for a post COVID-19 environment. As he set about researching the virus to ensure that campus would be safe for the return of students, he realised the critical importance of air quality.

“We realised that there has to be clean air, because COVID 19 is primarily an airborne disease, more than one which is spread by physical contact.  But as we began to study air quality, we realised that less than a couple of hundred metres from us, is one of the main motorways in the country, with its own major impact on that same air quality. We began to look at what the effect was of being in such close proximity to all the engine exhaust fumes, benzene gases, smoke and other pollutants.”

The school subsequently decided to totally overhaul the campus HVAC system, importing 74 air scrubbing machines from Korea, which filter the dirty air filled with dust and pollen, then neutralise the toxic air with its volatile organic compounds: the gases, smoke and fumes; and finally decontaminate the sick air with its viruses, mould, bacteria and fungi. The air is then pumped out as quickly and as often as needed and replaced with fresh air, further reducing the risk to those breathing it.

“The deeper we ventured into this process, the more we were struck by the reality that just as fish need clean water to survive and thrive, so do we need clean air to be at our very best. It doesn’t help being the healthiest koi in the pond, when you’re riddled with cancerous tumours, but we don’t think about air quality until we come face to face with it,” Foster-Pedley says.

Air quality though is just one part of the whole, preserving human life in a way that sustains the planet.

“The quality of the water is key to the health of the fish that swims in it. If we can clean the air in our lecture rooms, libraries and offices, then what about cleaning up the relationships we have with each other and the culture of the organisation? Why stop there? We can clean up the culture of government and how we engage with it and how we hold our representatives to account rather than just becoming despondent and turning our heads,” Foster-Pedley asks.

For Henley Africa, it’s an integrated process that starts with leading the way by practicing what they preach. Becoming carbon neutral is a critical building block in this process.

“We have to build back better. Business holds the key to this but it can’t be business as usual, rather one that puts the prosperity of the entire value chain above simply profits for shareholders. If we are serious about building the leaders who will build the businesses that will build Africa, as a business school that is first and foremost a business that bootstrapped itself to the position it enjoys today, we have to live by example – not by parroting theories from dusty textbooks.”

Henley Business School Africa is a leading global business school with campuses in Europe, Asia and Africa and the only business school in Africa to hold quadruple international accreditation. It has the number 1 business school alumni network in the world for potential to network (Economist 2017); and is the number 1 African-accredited and -campused business school in the world for executive education (FT 2018, 2020,2022), as well as the number 1 MBA business school in South Africa as rated by corporate SA (PMR.Africa 2018, 2019, 2020 and 2021). It is the first and only leading business school in the country to hold Level 1 B-BBEE ranking.