Q&A with Vicky Lucas on the private sector at COP30

With COP30 in full swing, IRES Master’s student Vicky Lucas wants us to watch the attendee list as closely as the agenda.

“Lobbyists from oil and gas often get a lot of attention, but COP attendees include a wider group from the private sector than you might expect,” said Lucas. “We’re seeing a lot of management consultancies at COP30—the list includes Bain & Company, Boston Consulting Group, Deloitte and PricewaterhouseCoopers.”

Climate consultancy is part of a larger pattern where governments, including Canada under Trudeau and Carney, increasingly use management consultancies for work that might previously have been carried out by public sector employees.

For her thesis research, Lucas spoke with 30 expert climate information providers or users, including climate consultants. These interviews left her feeling skeptical about the private sector’s involvement in climate consultancy.

We asked Lucas to help us understand her skepticism.

Often, consultancies provide their clients with convenient, discrete packages and reports purporting to address short-term effects of weather events as well as the long-term effects of climate change.

A lot of what is termed “climate consulting” is too short-lived to actually address the longer timescale of climate concerns. Since recent weather events are measurable, it’s much easier to provide solutions for how to respond, but climate questions – like the hypothetical one of how high to build the seawall to account for rising sea levels in the next 30 years – are much harder to quantify.

Who is responsible for these quick-fix answers to climate questions?

The responsibility is shared between consultancies, clients, and governments.

Consultancies aren’t fully to blame for this trend. They basically give clients what they ask for. One expert I spoke with said most of their clients just want to know what to do next year or the year after. Clients want guaranteed solutions, not mere predictions. But for the climate, all we can do is offer predictions, and reduce uncertainty by conducting scientific tests to make sure that these predictions are as robust as possible.

We also can’t shift the blame to individual workers. One of the people I spoke to simply did not have enough hours in their workday to do their normal job and create a climate action plan, so their team chose to outsource the work to a management consultancy.

Ultimately, companies involved in climate consultancy are businesses trying to make money. They are not governments, which by definition have responsibilities to people and the infrastructure that people use.

How are major companies participating in COP30?

Management consultancies are becoming more intertwined in what you might think would be strictly governmental negotiations.

One of the world’s largest multibillion-dollar firms, Boston Consulting Group (BCG), is in the Blue Zone at COP30. At COP, everybody can go into the Green Zone. The Blue Zone is supposed to be for countries only, but this year BCG’s website confirms that they are indeed in the Blue Zone. Governments are often the direct client for management consultancies. For example, PricewaterhouseCoopers is at COP30 with the Singaporean government. This is likely how most management consultancies end up in the Blue Zone.

The annual climate conferences do invite any relevant interest groups such as, NGOs, and universities—including UBC’s own delegation—but we should all be more aware of private sector attendees. Climate consulting done well will ease the burden of the changes needed, but poorly informed or hasty decisions may only serve the profits of the advisors.

You can’t simply throw data, reports, and technical fixes at the climate crisis. For real-world climate adaption, Lucas’s research suggests that personal relationships are needed alongside data modeling:

Article text by Nivretta Thatra and Vicky Lucas, Image by Vicky Lucas