Professor Ok Yong-sik from the Department of Environmental Ecology Engineering at Korea University and Professor Lee Jae-hyuk from Korea University Business School, who are co-chairmen of the International ESG Association, held a forum on sustainable management on July 13 at the Marina Bay Sands Convention Center in Singapore. They introduced the 2022 Global ESG Forum to be held at the Korea Chamber of Commerce and Industry in August and gave lectures on sustainability management strategies for universities and corporations.
Notably, at this Singapore forum, an MOU was signed with the Korean Scientists and Engineers Association (Chairman Cho Nam-jun, Chair Professor at Nanyang Technological University) to jointly hold ESG forums. A partnership was established for the 2023 Global ESG Forum scheduled to be held at CREATE Singapore in November 2023 and June 2024.
The ESG forum was attended by key stakeholders from major Singaporean companies, embassies, chambers of commerce, universities, research institutes, and investment firms. Participants included △ Kim Jung-wook, Head of Samsung SDS Asia Pacific △ Cho Nam-jun, Chairman of the Korean Scientists and Engineers Association in Singapore △ Kim Chan-woo, Honorary Professor at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (former Climate Change Ambassador) △ Son Jong-min, CEO of Hanwha Investment & Securities (Pine Securities SG) △ Professor Park Won-seok from Chung-Ang University Law School △ Hwang Sung-yeon, Director at the Korea Research Institute of Chemical Technology △ Lee Jeung-gu, Chairman of World OKTA Singapore, as well as professors from Nanyang Technological University and the National University of Singapore, representing prominent scholars and business leaders from Korea and Singapore.
Following Professor Ok Yong-sik’s introduction of the global ESG forum series, Professor Lee Jae-hyuk delivered a lecture on the topic “ESG Management: How to Prepare?” On the Singapore side, five lectures were given, including one by Kim Jung-wook, Head of Samsung SDS Asia Pacific, on building supply chains for digital ESG management. Particularly, Professor Cho Nam-jun, Chairman of the Korean Scientists and Engineers Association in Singapore, presented on the innovation status and recommendations for sustainable domestic university management, emphasizing the expansion of educational funding for educational innovation and talent development, and outlining the direction universities should pursue in ESG management.
Meanwhile, Professor Ok Yong-sik, based on his extensive experience with international organizations on ESG, UN SDGs, and sustainability, researches the overall composition of the E (environment) pillar of ESG, including climate change, biodiversity, and plastic waste. He also studies corporate ESG evaluation criteria and methods. Especially, as a speaker at forums such as the Shinhan Connect Forum and POSCO Forum targeting CEOs and CFOs, he provides various consulting services on corporate environmental risks and opportunities.
Professor Ok was the first Korean in the environmental ecology field to be selected as an HCR (Highly Cited Researcher) in the world’s top 1%. Since 2017, he has surpassed 50,000 citations on Google Scholar over the past five years, with an h-index of 117 and an i10-index of 614 in the same period, establishing himself as a top researcher in the environmental field. He conducts international joint research with over 400 companies, universities, and government agencies across 48 countries and launched initiatives responding to UN plastic pollution regulation agreements. On May 5, 2022, he received the Korea University Seoktap Research Award and the inaugural Seoktap International Cooperation Award simultaneously, and was also selected as a recipient of the Prime Minister and Minister of Education Commendation for Distinguished Teachers on the 41st Teachers’ Day.
Professor Lee Jae-hyuk has served as a member of the Responsible Investment Subcommittee of the National Pension Service’s Stewardship Responsibility Committee, a member of the Corporate Governance Committee at the Korea Corporate Governance Service, and president of the Korean Strategic Management Society. Currently, he serves as co-chairman of the International ESG Association, a member of Korea University’s ESG Committee, an advisor to the Korea Listed Companies Association, head of the Sustainability Subcommittee of the Industrial Policy Research Working Group, and vice president of the Korean Academy of Management. He actively conducts research, writing, and projects in various fields including sustainability and evaluation (ESG), corporate social responsibility (CSR), sustainable development goals (SDG), management strategy, and global strategy. He has published papers in numerous journals, including the Journal of International Business Studies (JIBS), the most prestigious international journal in international business, and recently developed and evaluated ESG indicators for a sustainability management survey targeting Korea’s top 200 companies by market capitalization.
Meanwhile, the International ESG Association anticipates that non-financial performance represented by Environment (E), Social (S), and Governance (G) will become increasingly important for companies to comprehensively assess their management activities and ultimately enhance sustainability. In this context, Korean companies are judged to need to move beyond a passive stance of merely complying with existing ESG-related rules and actively play a leading role in new ESG initiatives. To meet these demands, the association plans to hold the world’s first ESG Nature Forum simultaneously with the ‘2022 Global ESG Forum’ in Seoul this August, in collaboration with Nature.
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