In 2022, at the Building Bridges sustainable finance conference in Geneva, we announced a landmark multi-year partnership with The Enterprise for Society Center (E4S) to foster sustainable finance research, with a particular focus on the transition to a circular economy.
E4S is a joint venture between the University of Lausanne, the International Institute for Management Development (IMD), and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL), whose mission is to spearhead the transition to a sustainable, resilient and inclusive economy. As part of our collaboration, we are working to develop pioneering research focussed on understanding the global system changes creating a circular economy, identifying the societal challenges of policy and disruptive technologies, and assessing the alignment of companies and investments with the circular economy.
As a still-nascent model, the circular economy lacks the economies of scale embedded in our long-established linear economy. Today’s economy also retains the competitive advantage of a pricing system that largely fails to factor in the true environmental cost of a take-make-waste model. The transition to a circular economy will require policy and regulations that force producers to pay the true cost of materials extraction, product manufacturing and waste disposal. Subsidies may also be needed to help circular systems gain economies of scale. Central to our work with E4S will be thinking through these deep system changes on a global and systemic level, and identifying the bottlenecks and social risks before they arise.
Jean-Pierre Danthine, Co-Managing Director of E4S, said, “We believe bending our current linear economy into a more circular one is an absolute priority in order to stay within planetary boundaries. We know how challenging this will be, but we are convinced that by combining our skills and approaches we can pioneer the necessary transition within the short time period at our disposal.”
Jean-Philippe Bonardi, Co-Managing Director of E4S, said, “Our partnership with Lombard Odier is a great opportunity to show that by building bridges between academia and business we can shift to an economy that benefits both people and the planet.”
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