Co-chairs of the 2024 ClimateCAP Summit (left to right): Sarah Cohen, Nikhil Khurana, Alex Reid, and Nick Rojas
The 2024 ClimateCAP summit will be hosted in Ann Arbor, Michigan by the Ross School of Business. Hundreds of MBA students nd business leaders are expected at what has become the premier climate-focused B-school event in the United States. The theme: “Sustainability in Motion.”
That covers a lot of topics, from the future of mobility and transportation to regenerative food systems. Remarkably, registration for the summit that will kick off in early February of 2024 sold out in only three hours — around 500 MBA students and others are expected to attend.
“We’ve been very intentional in choosing who to invite — the people we’ve invited are the ones we feel need to be here in the room for these topics to have these conversations,” says Nick Rojas, MBA/MS student at U-M’s Erb Institute and co-chair of the summit.
FIRST A SUMMIT ATTENDEE, NOW A CO-CHAIR
Nick Rojas, MBA/MS student at Ross and co-chair of the 2024 ClimateCAP summit
“We kick off the summit with a panel conversation on equity and access, which will be between a lot of folks from the Midwest. Equity is at the center, we want that to be the focus of the whole summit,” notes Rojas, MBA/MS student at Ross and co-chair of the summit.
Rojas is one of four co-chairs working to make the summit happen. He’s working alongside Sarah Cohen, Nikhil Khurana, and Alex Reid.
Rojas is currently in the last year of his three-year degree MBA/MS joint degree at Ross. “I knew this was only going to be possible if we had a dedicated crew of students who were brought in on the vision and felt like they personally wanted to make this happen,” he says.
He attended his first ClimateCAP summit at Northwestern Kellogg School of Management, and afterward felt driven to be a part of hosting the summit one day. Rojas says he built a deep appreciation of nature through exploring California as a Boy Scout — and ever since his mission has been to preserve it and make sure the natural landscape is still here for future generations to enjoy.
“The call came out for bids, and I started reaching out to folks,” he says. When he and the other co-chairs found out they won the bid, got buy-in from Ross Dean Sharon Matusik, faculty, and staff, they set forth on making it happen. They also received support from Duke University’s EDGE Center, whose leaders provided a guidebook on how to bring the summit to life. Duke hosted the first ClimateCAP in 2018.
500 STUDENTS & BUSINESS LEADERS IN THE HEART OF WINTER
Rojas and the co-chairs are committed to facilitating transformational conversations at the summit. He says, “We have 500 plus people coming to Michigan in the dead of winter. We are looking at the question of ‘what specific value can we provide those that are flying out here and meeting with other folks?’”
They also want to facilitate conversations and share conversations on best practices with those at other business schools — including successes, failures, new programs, and hot topics that other schools’ clubs have been focusing on.
How do they measure the success of the summit? “The sell-out is a solid confirmation that people want to attend. There’s so many conferences and things going on in the academic realm — you’re being pulled in one thousand different directions in business schools. One of the biggest measures of success will be in the feedback from the post-summit surveys. We want attendees to answer, ‘Did you get value in coming out here?’” says Rojas.
One of the conversations they’ll be having will be about transportation.
“We don’t have to accept that ‘If there are 100 million vehicles today, there will be 100 million vehicles in the future,’” he says. “This could be an opportunity for us to rethink how people get around. We are even talking about reassessing the modern day business school and how it’s set up and the priorities that it teaches us as students.”
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