Siberian Federal University

ESG stands for environment, social and corporate governance. The popularity of the ESG agenda reflects the interest of modern society in doing business not only in the streamline of income generation but also caring about the environment and reasonable consumption of resources.

Representatives of MMC Norilsk Nickel presented a comprehensive strategy in the field of sustainability and climate change, including the company's flagship Sulfur Program.

Andrey Bougrov, senior vice president for Sustainable Development of MMC Norilsk Nickel: “Tangible results of the program can already be observed on the Kola Peninsula. At the end of 2020, we decommissioned an outdated smelter in the village of Nickel bordering Norway. And the Norwegian neighbors even wrote that Norilsk Nickel gave them a gift for Christmas since cross-border emissions were reduced to zero. Positive effects are also observed in the Norilsk industrial district: the shutdown of the nickel plant in 2016 led to a reduction in sulfur dioxide emissions by more than 30 percent, which directly affected the health indicators of the population.”

The comprehensive program of Norilsk Nickel provides for the implementation of 300 projects with a budget of 400 billion roubles until 2030.

Elena Bezdenezhnykh, vice president for Regional Policy and Government and Administration Relations, RUSAL, in her speech focused on the social component of ESG, and not only on the implemented projects but also on the public opinion research system itself: "We communicate with people on a regular basis online. Everyone is doing this work: members of the board of directors, even foreign officers, and shareholders. They should see and hear what each of the company's employees wants. As a result, the roadmap of our company is dotted with meetings, feedback from people, a list of questions that they raised and a list of what we managed to solve — from a dogs home to moving the road.”

Sergey Verkhovets, director of the Project Office of Yenisey Siberia REC (SibFU), presenting the main mission of the centre, emphasized youth orientation and conceptually importance of youth participation in the ESG agenda.

“We pay a lot of attention to the preparation of end-to-end educational programs, from secodary to graduate school; network programs, support of individual educational trajectories. I would like to note that young people are at the epicentre of the ESG agenda, and SibFU is pursuing a broad educational policy in this area: series of lectures, scientific and educational expeditions, and online courses.

SibFU is also actively pursuing its own internal ESG policy — through comfortable green spaces on the university campus, work to promote green procurement (such as choosing equipment with lower energy consumption), rejection of plastic, waste paper collection projects, logistics optimization, switching to electric transport, etc.

Today it is important to take into account generational trends, since young people are guided by the openness of enterprises, opportunity for individual self-realization, and the ESG agenda. In this regard, we are developing proposals for the ESG ranking of Russian universities indicating certain events and we hope that this will be important not only in the framework of the admission campaign, but also for the allocation of funds.”

Another suggestion from Sergey Verkhovets is to present those vivid ESG reports, which almost every enterprise has today, on the unified information resource of Yenisey Siberia REC. Along with raising their accessibility for the general public, there materials will contribute to the involvement of students and staff in the ESG practices.