Business Impact
Now in it’s second year, this is an exciting collaboration between two of Oxford’s oldest and largest employers. In 2023, the BMW Oxford MINI plant celebrated it's 110th year of production in the city with around 1,000 cars built each day. Today the plant stands at the cutting edge of automotive manufacturing technology and sustainability after significant investments over the years. A major focus is the reduction of energy usage, water consumption, waste of all kinds and CO2 emissions. The roof of the building has a solar energy plant the size of five football pitches.
The purpose of the Lab partnership is to deliver high-impact and feasible research projects that will contribute to making the Plant’s operations, governance frameworks and organisational processes more sustainable and efficient. Previous areas of research have included climate impact, specifically how BMW Plant can improve overall consumption and waste management. In 2024, Lab Fellows will undertake research under the framework of BMW's 'Lean, Green, Digital' strategy.
Nico Rosberg - 2016 Formula One World Champion - is a Sustainability Entrepreneur and Start-up Investor. In 2023, he launched a non-profit, Rosberg Philanthropies, and this collaborative programme with the Lab is the first major funded project.
The Rosberg Climate Fellows programme sponsors Lab Fellows to work in collaboration with a range of businesses and NGOs conducting research related to environmental and climate change issues and develop innovative solutions to tackle big challenges. In the first year there were three projects focusing on, carbon capture (with Climeworks), alternative fuels (with Neste in a project focusing on the St. Helena ship of the Extreme_E racing team), and on the relationship between marine organisms and floating plastic debris (with the Ocean Cleanup.) In 2024 Fellows will be working on a project to identify how F1 sites can drive better biodiversity.
Research in the field of sustainable tourism offers Fellows an exciting opportunity to effect real change in a hugely important industry. In 2023, the UN World Tourism Organization and the SDG Impact Lab launched a ground-breaking project to develop the first harmonised ‘ESG Framework for Tourism Businesses.’
To inform the development of the framework, a group of 2023 Lab Fellows undertook a research project which included an extensive literature review of existing ESG practices, frameworks, and standards, followed by in-person pilot testing with 14 tourism companies and 27 hotels.
This framework will help tourism companies report their sustainability efforts and impact in a standardised, credible, and comparable manner, contributing to guiding the whole tourism sector towards a more sustainable future.
In 2024 Fellows will collaborate with UN Tourism to undertake the second phase of this project.
