A recent PwC Global CEO Survey indicated that 30% of CEOs selected climate change as an ‘extreme concern’. “This is due, in part, to the fact that corporates are facing increasing pressure from governments to meet decarbonisation targets,” says Dr Lee-Ann Steenkamp, a National Research Foundation- (NRF) rated researcher and tax academic at the University of Stellenbosch Business School (USB). She is also the first – and to date, only – female academic at USB to have been awarded this prestigious research accolade.

Steenkamp’s research delves into the intersection of taxation, accounting, and law, but the catalyst for her Ph.D was, surprisingly, loadshedding. “I got fed up. I’m not an engineer so I couldn’t investigate the problem from that side, but, given my skillset and academic background, I wanted to find out if there was some small way I could contribute to moving the country into more renewable energy,” she says. “That got me thinking – I’m a tax lecturer. How can we use taxes to either incentivise or penalise behaviour?”