Margherita Increases Visibility of the Carbon Bubble

The idea of a carbon bubble may not be familiar to Italian readers, but it is central to one of the most heated debates in the Anglo-Saxon world. The Bank of England recently declared it wants to investigate the issue and the G20 immediately followed their example.

According to supporters of the carbon bubble, companies working in the hydrocarbons sector are extremely overvalued "because many of their reserves may never be used if governments become fully aware of the problem of global warming and decide to intervene incisively," explains Margherita Gagliardi, a 2013 graduate of the Master in Green Management, Energy and Corporate Social Responsibility (MAGER). She is communications officer at Carbon Tracker Initiative, a London think tank that aims to raise awareness of the carbon bubble. "And we're talking about investments worth thousands of billions of dollars," she adds.

With the MAGER program, Margherita completed her education. Until then, it had focused on cultural management and culminated in a startup for creating cultural projects she founded with a few friends. "During the first half of 2012, thanks to the program Erasmus for Young Entrepreneurs, I worked in Brussels, where I developed a strong interest in sustainability and I decided to build up my background on the issue."

The MAGER program provided the education she was looking for and an international network both in academics and in business ("my classmates first of all, as the group was made up of half Italian students and half international students"). "I completed an internship as a researcher in Amsterdam," says Margherita, "at a company that assesses social responsibility and sustainability of businesses for ethical investors. I ended up at the think tank in London thanks to an application on LinkedIn, in a position that fit my background, combining sustainability and creative industries."

"Our think tank, funded by US and UK philanthropic foundations, is very specialized: it draws attention to risks in investing in hydrocarbons and then passes the ball to others to find solutions. In the wake of the movement for fossil fuel divestment, we're growing quickly: in 18 months, we went from 3 people to about 20." And it's very creative, according to the Guardian Sustainable Business Awards who awarded the think tank its Innovation in Communicating Sustainability prize in 2014 and 2015. Maybe their passion for infographics, which Margherita has developed over the years and which she puts to use, has something to do with it...