• Identify the opportunities, challenges, risks and efforts needed to address environmental sustainability.
• Apply key notions of environmental sustainability within an organizational/company context (both internally and externally) through both theoretical and practical cases..
• Apply a broad set of environmental indicators and considerations that will support the application of a sustainability vision, strategy and value system in support of business practices and deal flows.
• • The ability to generate a robust business case for sustainability management that will offer the potential for actual improvements in business practices that consider environmental constraints.

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are a global call for all stakeholders to eradicate poverty, protect the planet and secure the right and privilege for people to live in peace and prosperity. The spirit of the SDGs is to move away from being ‘less bad’ towards become ‘more good’. These courses focuses on how businesses can inact and execute initiatives in service of these dynamic and inspiring goals. 

In the business community, we have to move away from sustainability being equal solely to aspirational talk, to CSR reporting, to noteworthy pilot projects that never scale within the company’s fabric, to a nuanced and witty discussion about governance. Quite frankly, where is the environment in the business discourse? Environmental scientists would say that it never adequately entered the business discussion. Inversely, others would say that traditional business education has never adequately given business students the tools to understand what is environmental sustainability and how it can affect a company’s technical, financial, managerial, and political challenges. In light that we are surpassing our planets boundaries, environmental sustainability management matters because we must learn to not only to manage our businesses to ensure that our planet is maintained but similarly to manage our planet to ensure that business can be maintained.

Since the 1980s, interest in market-based approaches to environmental management has directed attention to ways in which firms can design deals and manage risk that simultaneously correct for market failures. Running in parallel to these developments, the concept of ecosystem services emerged as an important metric through which the biophysical flows are measured in terms of economic values. In terms of magnitude, Costanza et al. (2014) estimate the global value of ecosystem services in 2011 at $125 trillion, much of which is not accounted for in measures of gross domestic product and, in any case, is considerably larger than the gross world product estimates for that year. In other words, a tremendous source of economic value simply does not count in economic - or business - considerations. Not only is making sure that at least some of this value does come to count in economic decisions and business strategies likely to be critical to sustainability, the weakness of these considerations on the part of certain stakeholders results that, for example the private sector may be blind to a critical component of the global economy.

This introductory course will begin by training all future business leaders to clearly define what sustainability management is and how to interpret and engage within a sustainable economy. While organizations have been historically tasked to manage human-environmental relationships, modern organizational activities have been less appreciative of linking both the social and the environmental since the rise of the Industrial Revolution. This gap in appreciation has now been reversed with the Danish Government, the Confederation of Danish Industries, DANIDA et al., all stressing that a mastery of how to develop systems to integrate the management of SDG issues into everyday business decision-making is essencial. The private sector needs to have incoming employees identify how business models can be adjusted to acount for environmental change, develop new products or services, transformed supply chains, initiate innovation and R&D initaitives that re-focus sustainability strategies that work to ensure corporate goals and the SDGs

Students will have the opportunity to learn about a number of sustainability challenges and opportunities that can benefit a variety of industries and organizations, such as:

• Systems-thinking including Complex Adaptive Systems and the circular economy Natural Capital, and applying ecosystem services to managerial decision-making;

• Evaluating evidence to enhance use and usefulness of data for impact assessment in specific financial deals

By studying these environmental considerations in a strategic fashion, students will:

• Understand when and how to consider scientific principles that underpin business operations;   

• Apply strategies to communicate and implement sustainability practices in diverse organizational settings; and

• Develop knowledge and skills required for nimble and interdisciplinary thinking desired by all organizations

Who is this class for:

This course is for students who aim at becoming sustainability change leaders in their future companies who wish to acquire a broader and deeper understanding on the notion of business sustainability. This is also a course for students who do not wish to proceed in a business as usual fashion and want to equip themselves with key knowledge that will be invaluable when moving forward in their careers. This is also a course that can help align your values with your future career.

Chan, K. M., Anderson, E., Chapman, M., Jespersen, K., & Olmsted, P. (2017). Payments for Ecosystem Services: Rife With Problems and Potential—For Transformation Towards Sustainability. Ecological Economics, 140, 110-122.

Costanza, R., de Groot, R., Sutton, P., van der Ploeg, S., Anderson, S. J., Kubiszewski, I., ... & Turner, R. K. (2014). Changes in the global value of ecosystem services. Global environmental change, 26, 152-158.

Cooperman, E. S. (2013). The Greening of Finance: A Brief Overview. International Review of Accounting, Banking & Finance, 5(1).

Falkner, R. (2003). Private environmental governance and international relations: exploring the links. Global environmental politics, 3(2), 72-87.

Gómez-Baggethun, E., De Groot, R., Lomas, P. L., & Montes, C. (2010). The history of ecosystem services in economic theory and practice: from early notions to markets and payment schemes. Ecological economics, 69(6), 1209-1218.

Gómez-Baggethun, E., & Ruiz-Pérez, M. (2011). Economic valuation and the commodification of ecosystem services. Progress in Physical Geography, 35(5), 613-628.

Jespersen, K., & Gallemore, C. (2018). The Institutional Work of Payments for Ecosystem Services: Why the Mundane Should Matter. Ecological Economics, 146, 507-519.

Koppenjan, J. F., & Enserink, B. (2009). Public–private partnerships in urban infrastructures: reconciling private sector participation and sustainability. Public Administration Review, 69(2), 284-296.

O’Rourke, D. (2014). The science of sustainable supply chains. Science, 344(6188), 1124-1127.

Schwarz, J., Beloff, B., & Beaver, E. (2002). Use sustainability metrics to guide decision-making. Chemical Engineering Progress, 98(7), 58-63.

Talukdar, D., & Meisner, C. M. (2001). Does the private sector help or hurt the environment? Evidence from carbon dioxide pollution in developing countries. World development, 29(5), 827-840.

Warner, M., & Sullivan, R. (Eds.). (2017). Putting partnerships to work: Strategic alliances for development between government, the private sector and civil society. Routledge.

Weber, E. U. (2017). Breaking cognitive barriers to a sustainable future. Nature Human Behaviour, 1, 0013.