“We have a significant reduction in our carbon footprint,” assures the president of EY in France

Climate change in business is an increasingly important subject. The audit firm EY in France has just created an idea laboratory on this subject, the EY Impact Lab. Éric Fourel, its president, is Franceinfo’s eco guest.

Éric Fourel is the president of EY in France, an audit and consulting firm which has just created an ideas laboratory, the EY Impact Lab in Paris. It is an immersive space which welcomes leaders by showing them the concrete consequences of global warming in 20 years if nothing changes.

franceinfo: Can you explain to us what this “space”, the EY Impact Lab, is?

Eric Fourel: We launched the EY Impact Lab a little over two months ago now. In fact, it is a place that is 100% dedicated to supporting companies and managers in their reflection and management of the climate transition. It is a collaborative place which is intended to facilitate awareness and above all reflection and inspiration, to be able to design action plans, reflect on one’s strategy and develop one’s business models. A set of actions which are essential today in relation to the challenges of climate transition.

You concretely show them a Paris in 2043 where it is almost 50 degrees, with pseudo-testimonies from consultants, CEOs who say : “We didn’t know, we could have…” What need and demand does this meet?

The journey within the EY Impact Lab begins with this immersive film that we produced, based on the findings of the sixth IPCC report. So we didn’t invent anything. We simply tried to construct scenarios that facilitate awareness of the consequences of inaction. And inaction, in 2043, effectively means a Paris that must face global warming of around 3°C since the 1.5°C objective of the Paris agreements will be reached by 2035 at best. We are today on a trajectory which, if it is not modified, will actually be around 2.5, or even 2.9°C. Today, few people are aware of it, even if awareness is still much greater than three or four years ago. So we’ve made a lot of progress, fortunately. But what we are not aware of is that France is today the country where global warming is most pronounced.

When leaders leave this path, is there an awareness followed by actions?

That’s the whole question. How do we take action? And basically, this is the problem that we have collectively today, because companies have put the objective of managing the climate transition at the very top. This emerges in particular from the analyzes carried out as part of the CSRD preparation study. [Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive, une directive européenne], which was made for Medef. This is also what emerges from the analyzes of the Business Institute. And the goal of the film is to create alignment on awareness. EY has not become radical today and we are not here to fuel eco-anxiety.

“We see that today the problem with global warming is not so much climate skeptics, but rather climate fatalism.”

Éric Fourel, president of EY in France

at franceinfo

What are you doing concretely, at EY in France, to fight against this warming?

Indeed, we will say to ourselves that advisors should perhaps start by sweeping their own doors. At EY, we are involved in consulting and auditing, so we obviously have the chance to be in an activity that is low carbon. In our last financial year, we emitted 8,500 tonnes of CO2 while we were at 12,000 in 2021, so we still have a significant reduction. But 90% of our emissions are linked to transport during business trips. We have therefore put in place an action plan in this area, prohibiting or excluding as much as possible any travel by plane as long as we can go from one city to another in less than four hours. We also carry out, for each of the partners of our firm, an individual carbon assessment to build a trajectory of reducing their emissions by 35% which is our objective by next year.