The International Cooperative Alliance estimates that 280 million people – or about 10% of the world’s working population – are employed by co-ops. Collectively, the world’s three million cooperatives claim 12% of humanity as members. In 2023, the largest 300 cooperatives and mutuals together generated US$2.8 trillion in revenue, according to the World Cooperative Monitor.

But education for cooperative governance is not commensurate with the influence of co-ops. A study published in March highlighted the relative absence of cooperative education at business schools, not to mention in management and economics textbooks. The authors found that “the single most important non-mainstream business model, the co-op enterprise, is currently absent in most business schools most of the time.”

“You can do your MBA and never hear about co-ops,” says Daniel Brunette, a senior director at Co-operatives and Mutuals Canada. The national association has done exercises around getting more co-op education in Canada, but setting up new academic programs at universities is a long, arduous undertaking. The only full graduate degrees offered in Canada are the master’s and graduate diplomas of management for co-operatives and credit unions at Saint Mary’s University in Nova Scotia. Other schools allow students to specialize in cooperatives.

Even in Quebec, which has the most developed cooperative culture in Canada and whose 3,000 co-ops represent some 14% of the province’s economy, many business schools barely mention them, says Rafael Ziegler, a specialist in sustainability management and the director of the Institut international des coopératives Alphonse-et-Dorimène-Desjardins (IICADD) at HEC (Hautes études commerciales) Montréal.

The institute is home to the Portail Co-op, an online library devoted to cooperatives and mutuals, which was developed in part to help address the paucity of cooperative education.

A one-of-a-kind archive

Alphonse Desjardins, the godfather of the credit union movement in Canada, understood the importance of this kind of information-sharing. It was only through contacts in Europe that he came to understand the people’s savings and credit systems that were sweeping the continent in the late 19th century. And after establishing North America’s first credit union in Lévis, Quebec, in 1909, he spent much of the rest of his life explaining – in lectures, articles and letters – how the model could be adapted to different contexts to protect the interests of Quebec’s working and rural classes.

It is fitting that Portail Co-op was made possible by a donation from the Desjardins Group, which is now North America’s largest financial cooperative. Ziegler believes that, with its dedicated librarian and technician, the repository is the only one of its kind in the world.

At HEC Montréal, where Ziegler teaches, the cooperative form is integrated into courses across the program, particularly as it relates to sustainability and the circular economy, subjects that attract significant interest. He sees this as an auspicious confluence, as the values of today’s students are increasingly aligned with those of cooperatives.

The return of the collective economy

Part of the idea behind the Portail is to create an institutional memory for the cooperative movement; its technician spends much of her time digitalizing archival material, from photographs to newsletters to financial reports.

The library’s other function is to offer co-op members and researchers access to the widest possible array of relevant documents. The Portail covers 150 years of cooperative history, in 36 languages and from 84 countries.

Working together with Cooperatives and Mutuals Canada and the Canadian Association for Studies in Co-operation, the library curates thematic collections about issues and trends like climate change and digital services. “Obviously, we work as cooperatively as possible to distribute the library’s content,” Ziegler says.

Business schools should pay more attention to co-ops, Brunette says, because they breed resilience by their very nature. “The beauty and challenge of collective entrepreneurship is that you have to get people around the same table,” he says. “And that’s how you’ll weather the storms.”

Cooperatives are also much more territorially anchored, Ziegler points out, so they are unlikely to move elsewhere for a competitive advantage. In an era of escalating trade threats and multiplying crises, domestic rootedness is its own kind of asset.

Naomi Buck is a writer based in Toronto. Mark Mann is the managing editor at Corporate Knights.

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Four of the five biggest banks, two of the three biggest grocers and one of the three biggest telecoms are helmed by CEOs with MBAs. Though this should come as no surprise, as the share of MBA-holding CEOs has nearly doubled in the last 45 years. Beyond the top job, the number of MBA grads in the C-suite, on corporate boards and in middle management roles continues to rise.

This is undoubtedly good news for Canada’s business schools. Along with bold mottoes, promising to change the world for the better, the employment outcomes of their graduates represent a useful marketing tool to entice future students into their programs.

And this prevalence of MBAs in Canada’s business elite should be equally welcomed by current and future MBA students, as data suggest that the more MBAs on a corporate board, the more likely that business-degree holders will be appointed to key roles.

But while Canadian business schools and their students may be celebrating, Canadians should be more skeptical of the increasing dominance of MBA graduates. That’s because business leaders with MBAs are more likely to engage in more short-term strategic planning, focusing on quarterly earnings, improving dividends and driving up stock price while ignoring long-term drivers of productivity like innovation and research and development.

MBA-trained CEOs tend to be more self-serving than their counterparts, pursuing rapid, costly growth at the expense of their employees or customers. And CEOs with business degrees reduce wages, on average, by 6% in the five-year periods following their appointments.

Indeed, the rise of the MBA graduate correlates suspiciously well with the increase in wage stagnation, worker precarity and corporate consolidation.

So while business schools pitch us lofty mottoes, like “Inspiring leaders for a sustainable and prosperous world,” why does it seem like their alumni have led us somewhere completely different? Because while in theory business schools prepare the leaders of tomorrow, in practice business education has become focused on technical and vocational instruction devoid of any moral or civic responsibility.

What’s wrong with business schools

Instead of accepting that managing complex organizations requires more than knowing the “5 Ps” of marketing, MBA curricula rely on frameworks and simplified management tools to reduce what is a complicated art to a simple science, rewarding memorization over creativity and critical thinking.

Rigorous analysis of business cases is meant to simulate real-world situations and force students to deal with ambiguity, both ethically and situationally. Instead, students accustom themselves to uncomplicated analyses, summarized in a few pages, written with coherent narratives.

Without reform, business schools should be understood as vocational training centres, whose sole goal is creating job-ready graduates, and whose key selling feature is the starting salary of their graduates. No more, no less.

– Danny Parys, strategy consultant

Management students are encouraged to employ a top-down view of organizations, trained to view the complex inputs of a business or economy as mere elements on a spreadsheet, devoid of ethical constraints. In business schools, humans are, often, just resources. Cases from around the globe are discussed, though little time is spent understanding the history or culture of a region, reinforcing the erroneous idea that what works in Tijuana must also work in Toronto.

This tendency to oversimplify often creates overconfident graduates who feel they can move seamlessly into new organizations and apply cookie-cutter theories and frameworks without understanding the context or culture they are operating in.

Which is ironic, because in Canadian business schools the question of culture and diversity is front and centre. The Ivey MBA, for example, boasts that its student body is made up of 40% women, 40% international students, from 25 different countries, and speaks a combined 21 languages.

Learning from one’s classmates and respecting their experience is, of course, a noble idea. Though for all the talk of geographic, ethnic and gender diversity, most MBA students share a common worldview. Unsurprising, as students are selected, and self-select, in part, based on their prior work experience, future career goals and ability to pay hefty tuition fees.

While on paper a class may be very diverse, most students tend to share similar work experiences, similar educational backgrounds and have similar goals. It seems that for Canadian business schools, diversity is reduced to metrics on a spreadsheet.

How to reform business education

It’s clear that Canadians value strong business education. Take a quick trip to any university campus and you’ll see that the business schools are often housed in the nicest, newest buildings. Their graduates command comfortable salaries. The Telfer School of Management, for example, claims that its MBA students can expect a 27% salary increase just three months after graduation.

But if business schools want to continue marketing themselves as a force for a better Canada, and retain their reputation for producing leaders, serious changes must be made. This means rethinking what diversity means and making efforts to attract candidates from diverse working backgrounds, without corporate baggage. Teachers, nurses and non-degree-holding workers could provide real diversity in MBA class discussions, sharing perspectives from beyond the boardroom.

Business schools need to rethink how they advertise their programs. It should come as no surprise that a marketing strategy focused on return on investment in the form of higher salaries will attract candidates, and create a student body, who value personal financial success above all else.

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The content of the curriculum must also evolve. Case studies can be valuable tools, but there should be more analysis of impacts outside of the organization in question. Students who one day may be forced to contemplate downsizing a company need to be discussing how layoffs affect communities and individuals. Future finance bros need to understand how leveraged buyouts put pressure on employees.

Ethics, philosophy, art, literature, history – subjects often considered frivolous or unnecessary for business careers have for centuries been considered non-negotiable when it comes to forming leaders and developing creativity. If we are going to continue to venerate business executives as leaders and visionaries, humanities education should be included in their development.

It’s of course entirely acceptable if business schools choose not to reform. Though if this is the case, we must be cleared-eyed about what it means. Without reform, business schools should be understood as vocational training centres, whose sole goal is creating job-ready graduates, and whose key selling feature is the starting salary of their graduates. No more, no less.

If reform is not on the menu, and it doesn’t seem to be, then it’s time to stop venerating business schools, and stop pretending the MBA student is a leader in training.

Choosing the status quo means more power must be given to other stakeholders and promoting alternative forms of corporate governance: more worker representation on corporate boards, more cooperative enterprises, and more bargaining power for unions and labour leaders, with the MBA graduate relegated to the role of managerial technician, whose voice is no louder than the rest.

Danny Parys is a strategy consultant based in Montreal. He holds an MBA from HEC Montréal.

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Reducing that deficit is the main goal of non-profit Industry Immersion Africa (iiAfrica), which is hoping to stem the brain drain of talented students to the West when they are so badly needed on the continent to contribute to the economic transformation of Africa.

Assisted by business professors in Germany and Canada as well as Academics Without Borders, iiAfrica delivers a program that teaches business fundamentals and provides workplace internships to top STEM graduates like Marima.

Since 2017, the Industry Immersion Program has graduated 274 STEM students from 27 African countries. All of them, says iiAfrica managing director David Attipoe, “have remained on the African continent, working for businesses here, and most have gone on to be managers.”

Key to iiAfrica’s early success is a partnership between the European School of Management and Technology (ESMT), a Berlin-based private non-profit business school, and the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences (AIMS), based in South Africa with campuses in other African countries. Initially, ESMT professors travelled to South Africa to teach business principles to AIMS students for five weeks before the students moved into a three-month (at least) company internship.

More than 80% of graduates have landed meaningful jobs within one year of graduation, according to iiAfrica.

The lure of STEM scholarships

When founding ESMT dean Wulff Plinke was a guest lecturer at AIMS in 2014, he found the students were passionate about math but not, as had been assumed, interested in teaching careers. Instead, he says, “they wanted to use mathematics in the economic world.”

Plinke knew from experience that well-intentioned scholarships from Western institutions often lead African students to stay abroad after their studies instead of returning home.

With iiAfrica’s program, he adds, “it is not in our vision that anyone would leave Africa after the program. We want to bring them into employment, and we did.”

You can educate people until the cows come home, but if the jobs aren’t there, then it gets to be really tough.

–David Dunne, a business professor at the University of Victoria

Currently, students at AIMS campuses in South Africa, Ghana, Rwanda, Senegal and Cameroon and at Strathmore University in Kenya pay no tuition for the program and earn a certificate in business administration. University partners pay for internet access, housing and tutor support.

Marima, who is from Harare, Zimbabwe, joined the program in 2018. She says the business studies curriculum “opened doors to a world that I had no idea existed.” Though well-versed in statistics and math through her AIMS degree, she notes that “you don’t get to learn much about business from those disciplines.”

After the academic component, Marima landed an internship with B. Braun, a German medical and pharmaceutical device company with an office in Harare. After three months, she joined the company full-time and now is a human capital and strategic development manager overseeing a staff of 30 people. She plans to earn a master’s in business administration from the University of Zimbabwe.

A Canadian business school connection

Since 2019, iiAfrica has partnered with Canada’s Academics Without Borders (AWB) to scale up the program across Africa. Business professors from Canada volunteer their time in the classroom and train campus-based African tutors at each participating university, ultimately replacing themselves.

With this train-the-trainer model, African universities build capacity, says AWB executive director Greg Moran. “We try to collaborate with partners in the developing world to make changes they can sustain themselves.”

Like iiAfrica, AWB believes that part of its mission is to stem the exodus of graduates from Africa. One way to do that, says Moran, “is to help them build capacity in their own programs.”

Still, challenges remain: iiAfrica aims to add one African university each year to the program, but too often participating universities lack financial resources to pay their share of costs. As well, as enrolment climbs, so does pressure to secure internships, in-person or virtual.

David Dunne, a business professor at the University of Victoria and a former AWB board chairman who coordinates scale-up efforts with iiAfrica, is developing a template to add African university partners. “You can educate people until the cows come home, but if the jobs aren’t there, then it gets to be really tough.”

Attipoe agrees: “We need a lot of support from organizations around the world who believe in the transformation of STEM graduates in Africa.”

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Laudable, say youth activists, sustainable business leaders and those tracking school performance, but still not good enough to equip tomorrow’s corporate leaders for purpose beyond profit.

“The pace of change is definitely not as fast as it should be given the climate crisis and the social crisis we are in, and the ambition is not high enough,” says Maxime Lakat, executive director of Re_Generation, a youth-led campaign for business schools and companies to incorporate human and ecological wellbeing in decision-making.

No less impatient is Mette Morsing, head of the United Nations Principles for Responsible Management Education, the largest global initiative on transforming leadership to address the UN’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). “We know what to do, but progress is slow,” says Morsing, whose organization was founded in 2007 and now has 880 business school signatories. “If you look at business school curriculum, it is still very much driven by an agenda set in another time.”

Including purpose, not just profit, means business schools must prepare a different kind of future corporate leader.

“We want [MBA students] to think not just about profit maximization, shareholder supremacy and short-termism,” says Morsing. “We want them to think long-term, because that is what business needs – to think stakeholder orientation and to think about society at the centre of the stakeholder model, not the corporation.”

As schools reimagine themselves, the corporate-sector response is sometimes paradoxical: eager for a new generation of sustainability leaders but not always translating that aspiration in job postings.

“There is a gap between what is being taught and a company’s human resources and talent acquisition department knowing what is being taught,” observes Bernt Blankholm, founder and chief executive officer of Highered, the career arm of the European Foundation for Management Development, a global business school network. “I wish the recruitment industry would pay better attention to what is being taught,” he says. Too often, he adds, chief executive commitments on sustainability fail to trickle down to job descriptions for operational positions at the firm.

That said, businesses are clearly keen for school curricula that embed sustainability in core courses.

“There is no CEO of a company tomorrow that cannot understand sustainability,” predicts Tim Moerman, sustainability and ESG director for global brewer Anheuser-Busch InBev in Europe. He argues that MBA students, no matter their focus (finance, marketing or supply chain), must be well-versed in carbon emissions, packaging and water, for example, and their social and environmental impact. “If business schools don’t provide these kinds of competencies, students will not have jobs,” he warns.

The pace of change is definitely not as fast as it should be given the climate crisis and the social crisis we are in, and the ambition is not high enough.

-Maxime Lakat, executive director of Re_Generation

Among schools reimagining their MBA programs (see 2022 Better World MBA Top 40 ranking), common patterns emerge: increasing integration of sustainability in core courses, research relevant to the SDGs, and expanded opportunities for students to work with underserved communities.

At the Berlin-based European School of Management and Technology (ESMT), a private non-profit business school, 26% of fulltime MBA content links to ethical, social and environmental issues, including relevant case studies, according to the school. Students can work on social-impact projects at the school’s FUTURE Institute for Sustainable Transformation. In a boon for research, ESMT this year announced industry-funded professorships in sustainable finance, accounting impact measurement, circular business, and energy markets and transition.

“Sustainability is something that is at the core of the survival of the competitiveness of the company,” says ESMT president Jôrg Rocholl. “[Sustainability] now is a fundamental part of the strategic development of a company relating to all markets, from capital to labour, where new employees only want to work for companies that are truly sustainable.”

But are all schools doing enough?

“The answer is clearly no,” says Peter Bakker, president and chief executive of the Switzerland-based World Business Council for Sustainable Development. “I know business schools are moving, and many have added sustainability elements to their curriculum,” says the former global company CEO. “But in the core of the current business curriculum, it is still shareholder value that beats the drum.”

If you look at business school curriculum, it is still very much driven by an agenda set in another time.

–Mette Morsing, head of the United Nations Principles for Responsible Management Education

Reinforcing the profit focus, he observes, are rankings that reward a business school for MBA salaries two years after graduation. “Where you can get the best incomes is at Goldman Sachs and other firms on Wall Street,” says Bakker. “It is not going to be at some sustainability job somewhere.” He calls for a “system-wide conversation on ‘How do we actually measure how much impact a particular MBA has?’”

One alternative is a new global, student-driven assessment that rates, not ranks, a school’s commitment to tackling society’s big problems. In five categories, the Swiss-based Positive Impact Rating (PIR) system groups schools by their level of progress in demonstrating social impact.

Students, positioned as key stakeholders in a school’s mission, rate its curriculum, ped-agogy, student support, culture and societal engagement. They also assess whether schools are living up to their aspirations, identifying what they should do less, or more, of to deliver impact. “Students are right there [at school], and you can involve them,” says Katrin Muff, president of PIR and director of the Institute for Business Sustainability. “Students are amazing change-agents for schools.”

I know business schools are moving, and many have added sustainability elements to their curriculum, but in the core of the current business curriculum, it is still shareholder value that beats the drum.

-Peter Bakker, president of the World Business Council for Sustainable Development

Muff, who hopes to expand PIR to 100 schools next year from 46 currently, concedes that progress takes patience. “There are significant barriers to change, much more in the business school and university setting than business.”

One of those barriers is the academic reward system that credits discipline-focused faculty for the number of peer-reviewed citations.

“When we evaluate faculty for hiring or promotion and tenure and salary increases, how often are the criteria being looked at even asking for faculty contributions in terms of social purpose?” asks Wharton School business professor David Reibstein, a board member of the Responsible Research in Business and Management network, which promotes academic work that contributes to social good. “We really need to change that [citation] impact measurement.”

Amid calls for purpose-driven business education is a growing recognition of the role of systems thinking to effect change.

“Business schools are the embodiment of our inability to think in systems; there are many silos,” says Jury Gualandris, a professor of operations management and sustainability at Ivey Business School, whose purpose statement now reads “inspiring leaders for a sustainable and prosperous world.”

As leader of Ivey’s Centre for Building Sustainable Value and its sister organization, the Network for Business Sustainability, Gualandris sees the potential to harness the centre’s interdisciplinary research focus and the network’s problem-solving agenda to tackle complex problems from multiple perspectives. “How do we transition from a silo approach to knowledge to a more integrated approach?” he asks.

Gualandris reflects on how “impact” is not a buzzword in the school’s current material, “but it should be. It communicates well the intention behind what we do.”

In fact, intention, communication and system-wide collaboration will all need to align if business schools are to remain relevant in training tomorrow’s sustainability-savvy leaders.

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The answer, a strong yes, took shape with a willingness to further embed the United Nations’ 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) into course content and expand collaborations with non-business researchers also interested in environmental, social and governance (ESG) issues. That strategy to go deep on curriculum and wide on research is a theme that resonates through the 2021 Corporate Knights Better World MBA Ranking.

“The pandemic, for me, changed everything,” says Stephanie Schleimer, MBA director of Australia’s Griffith Business School, which took top spot in this year’s top-40 Better World ranking for the second year in a row. She adds: “It was this global awareness, for the very first time, that we are fragile as a society and [however] anyone would like to argue about COVID, in the end it is related to our fault as a society and our relationship with our planet and our natural environment and species.”

In the past year, Griffith faculty analyzed the Master of Business Administration’s core courses, already rich in sustainability topics, probing what was missing relative to the UN SDGs. Accounting, for example, became “accounting for accountability,” with students taught to read a balance sheet, as usual, but also how to value natural resources, including water consumption.

The school expanded collaboration with academics from other faculties to address global crises whose solutions are beyond the reach of one discipline.

In 2020, the school also almost doubled the number of publications on sustainability and ESG compared to a year earlier.

At York University’s Schulich School of Business, the top Canadian entry and fourth overall in the top-40 list, mounting concern about the climate crisis led to a decision to elevate sustainability as one of eight core areas in the MBA, starting fall 2022. Sustainability electives and specializations have been offered since the 1990s.

“We are looking at a watershed moment as far as recognition of the emergency of environmental degradation,” says interim dean Detlev Zwick. “We are a business school, and we are not advocating an end to capitalism; we need to be at the forefront of developing knowledge and approaches to save capitalism and the environment.”

With designated space now allocated for them, sustainability-conscious professors in real estate, ethics and other subjects work alongside each other at the school. “There is going to be very interdisciplinary work done and hopefully a lot of outreach to other faculty where similar questions are asked with a different lens,” says Zwick.

Cross-fertilization opportunities extend to MBA students who can take electives at York’s Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change. With its raised profile, sustainability becomes “the right platform” to expand interdisciplinary research, says Zwick, noting recent faculty success in landing Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council grants on corporate performance in ESG topics.

A similar pattern of collaboration applies at Griffith, where business students take electives offered through the university’s International Water Centre and business professors participate in multi-pronged, interdisciplinary research on climate change, civic engagement and social impact.

Interdisciplinarity comes naturally to the University of Vermont’s Grossman School of Business, eighth this year and a consistent top-10 Better World performer for its Sustainable Innovation MBA (SIMBA). Three Grossman faculty members are fellows at the university’s Gund Institute for Environment, whose director lectures in the business school, says SIMBA program director Caroline Hauser. Grossman recently hired a new faculty member with expertise in corporate sustainability strategies that add value by solving environmental problems.

This fall, the SIMBA program enrolled 47 students, the largest cohort in its eight-year history. Over the past year, the school added a course in data analytics tailored for sustainable businesses and, given the Black Lives Matter awakening, integrated identity themes into a course on leadership and teamwork.

“Since business schools started, being a leader has been defined in one specific way: the straight white male archetype,” says Hauser. “It’s really important to expand your idea of what a leader looks like.”

Meanwhile, recent program accreditation changes promote the enrichment of ESG content and cross-disciplinary cooperation. In 2020, AACSB International, a global accrediting body for business schools, identified societal impact in four of nine accreditation standards, with schools encouraged to “demonstrate how their programs, faculty, and learners will innovate to positively impact society,” president and CEO Caryn Beck-Dudley stated in an email.

For Switzerland’s University of St. Gallen, in ninth place in the top-40 list, doubling down on sustainability and SDG commitments is a top priority. School leaders spent the past two years assessing MBA content for coverage of corporate social responsibility and sustainability themes, concluding that they were fully incorporated in some courses but not in others. The refreshed MBA, set for fall 2022, now links to the UN’s SDGs.

Recently arrived MBA director Amanda Shantz, from Grimsby, Ontario, aims to build on the renewal. “What I would like to do is be a little bit more proactive when it comes to threading sustainability through the curriculum,” says Shantz, also noting the importance of gender, diversity and inclusion. “We have a really great opportunity to make change happen in business school.”

Institutionally committed to SDG principles, St. Gallen is home to more than 30 independent research institutes and centres that draw on various disciplines. Between 2015 and 2019, says Shantz, 87% of faculty journal articles were SDG-related.

Earlier this year, young academics at St. Gallen added momentum by establishing an “impact scholars’ community” to pursue multidisciplinary research related to the UN SDGs. “They want to create synergies across institutes and strengthen the collaborative research culture,” says Shantz.

Some schools actively encourage academics to escape discipline silos. The Netherlands’ Maastricht University School of Business and Economics identifies sustainability as one of three research priorities through 2025, with modest incentives (funding to host a conference or reduced teaching loads) for professors who look beyond their discipline.

The recent incorporation of two institutes on sustainability and governance into the school supports its ambition to deliver impact on global issues, says MBA director Boris Blumberg.

“Of course, [sustainability] problems are complex, the solutions are not clear, [as] there are many opinions,” he says. “And that is exactly what universities and business schools are there for: to put their energy into getting ideas on how to solve those complex problems.”

Jennifer Lewington is an intrepid reporter and writes regularly on many topics, including business school news.

The post The world’s most sustainable MBAs think global and teach local appeared first on Corporate Knights.

“Climate change is an emergency, and we need to start teaching it as one,” says Bi, a Grade 11 student at Lord Byng Secondary School in Vancouver. “To do that means our education system must reflect that and prepare students to face the climate emergency.”

Like Bi, fellow student activists, teacher unions and policy analysts are calling on education leaders to integrate sustainability and climate change education into elementary and secondary school curricula, enabling students to think critically about the global emergency.

“We need every single level of education, every single stakeholder and player in the field to make it a priority,” says Hilary Inwood, co-chair of a national network of education faculty members focused on embedding environmental and sustainability topics in teacher training. Inwood, who also leads the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education’s environmental and sustainability initiative, says that “education is critical in helping make the cultural shift towards sustainability that is required.”

At best, K–12 sustainability and climate change education is “uneven,” according to researchers. “We have a responsibility, especially for those who are educators, to be honest with young people about the reality of the urgency we are facing,” says Ellen Field, an assistant professor in Lakehead University’s education faculty.

“Our education system must prepare students to face the climate emergency.”
— Sophia Bi,
Climate Education Reform BC

Awarded a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council fellowship to explore teacher literacy about climate change, Field is co-author of an upcoming analysis of Grades 7 to 12 curricula that shows wide variations in climate-related learning expectations, with content found more in elective than mandatory courses.

Knowing climate change facts is insufficient, Field adds. “This curriculum must also provide a focus on solutions and help students develop the skills and initiative to lead solutions.”

That imperative to train the next generation of agents of change is widely shared by those pressing for holistic, climate-relevant curricula and teacher education.

Among those calling for change is the Canadian Teachers’ Federation, which has joined with a global network urging that climate change education be taught from a scientific and civic action perspective. “What we teach matters,” declared Education International president Susan Hopgood in announcing the campaign in April. “We must inspire students and communities to action.”

Mind the climate change education gap

Canadian researchers have identified system-level gaps in teaching and learning about climate topics.

In 2020, a study by the University of Saskatchewan’s Sustainability and Education Policy Network (part of an international research collaboration on global climate education) found that provinces and territories mention education in climate policies, such as energy efficiency upgrades for school buildings. By contrast, only 46% of jurisdictions develop climate-relevant policies for the classroom, generating “shallow engagement” with content. “The indirect message to students is climate change does not matter,” the study authors conclude.

“There is a leadership gap, unfortunately, and there just isn’t the prioritization that we would like to be seeing,” says Nicola Chopin, project manager at the Sustainability and Education Policy Network. Current ministry education policies, she warns, are inadequate to meet the 2016 Paris climate change agreement.

But change is happening at the grassroots level. “I am excited about the momentum,” says Pamela Schwartzberg, president and CEO of Learning for a Sustainable Future (LSF), a national non-profit that promotes environmental awareness and social responsibility for students and teachers. In 2020/2021, LSF hosted webinars on outdoor learning and climate change for 5,000 teachers and, during the pandemic, switched its youth forums online for 4,000 students.

Schwartzberg applauds student activism on curriculum. “They will push the teachers,” she predicts. “It is why we are all in this together.”

In April, Sophia Bi and other student members of Climate Education Reform BC released a six-point “open letter” to the provincial education minister, recommending comprehensive revisions that explain climate change to all grades and support teacher training.

“The curriculum must also provide
a focus on solutions to help students develop the skills and initiative to lead solutions.”
— Ellen Field, assistant professor,
Lakehead University education faculty

This spring, Alberta Youth Leaders for Environmental Education (AYLEE) drafted recommendations for the provincial education ministry to similarly revamp the curriculum. “One of the biggest problems with the existing curriculum is that climate [topics] are not included, and there are even fewer mentions of climate change,” says AYLEE member Sneha Rose Jigo, 18.

About to graduate from Lacombe Composite High School, northeast of Red Deer, Jigo likens climate and energy literacy to reading and writing fundamentals. “We want people to know how to read and write, so we teach it in school,” she says. “We want people to know how to interpret information about energy and climate, so we should teach that in school.”

Helping teachers make the grade

One barrier to climate change literacy is teacher confidence.

“[For] the majority of teachers who aren’t talking about climate change in the classroom, it’s not that they disagree it is an important issue; it’s that they lack the understanding to speak confidently about it to their students,” observes Anne Corkery, a Grade 6 and 7 teacher at St. Anne Catholic Elementary School in Peterborough, Ontario.

Corkery, recipient of a 2020 LSF Earth Steward Teaching Award, says her background in biology helps her bring environmental issues to life for students. Two years ago, she designed an outdoor project for students to tap sap from maple trees in the local neighbourhood, creating an opening to discuss scientists’ warnings about the negative impact of rising temperatures on Canada’s iconic tree.

When a city official complained that tapping trees was harmful, Corkery urged students to research the accuracy of the claim. The students presented their findings in a letter to the mayor of Peterborough, who invited them to City Hall and accepted their invitation to attend a school pancake lunch, complete with homemade maple syrup.

“The best part was seeing the kids feel so empowered,” Corkery says. She would be “thrilled” if Ontario mandated a climate change unit in all subjects, but only if teachers received appropriate professional development.

In response, some education faculties have new offerings.

Lakehead offers an elective in climate change education in the Master of Education and Bachelor of Education programs and has a mandatory environmental education class in the Bachelor of Education program. OISE requires intermediate–secondary teacher candidates to take a 36-hour course on environmental and sustainability education, including climate change.

At the University of British Columbia, teacher candidates can specialize in sustainability issues. Currently, Department of Language & Literacy Education assistant professor Derek Gladwin is working with a colleague to design a mandatory course in environmental literacy (subject to ministry approval) for prospective teachers, with a version for graduate students being piloted this fall.

“The candidates are hungry for it,” Gladwin says. “They know they need to be equipped with it before they head out to the schools.”

That’s also the assessment of George Radner, executive director of Vancouver-based Be the Change Earth Alliance, a non-profit offering climate workshops for teachers and students. One challenge, he says, is that unlike in elementary school, high school courses take a discipline-specific approach to foster deep knowledge of a subject, making it more difficult to explore the social, political and scientific dimensions of climate change. “You need an integrated model to break through these siloed disciplines,” he says.

Greening education from the inside out

Environmental organizations recruit teachers but also work with school boards and provincial ministries. EcoSchools Canada, founded in Ontario but operating nationally since 2019, works with one million students a year to help them acquire knowledge and leadership skills by working on environmental and climate action projects at school. Through a voluntary, curriculum-linked certification program developed by EcoSchools, K–12 schools and their boards gather data to measure their sustainability progress.

“As we are certifying, we are collecting a lot of data from them,” says EcoSchools executive director Lindsay Bunce. “We can leverage that database to identify conditions for success, gaps and opportunities and really cross-pollinate the best practices across the country.”

At the Niagara Catholic District School Board, a long-time EcoSchool member in Ontario, 46 of 57 schools earn points for sustainability-focused activities. The board has pledged to reduce bottled water use and upgrade lighting and heating, with plans for a sustainability dashboard at each school.

“We want the kids to see what their school’s consumption looks like and compare it to other schools,” says the board’s controller of facilities services, Clark Euale. “It’s important for the board, from an environmental sustainability perspective, to reduce our carbon footprint.”

In New Brunswick, The Gaia Project, a non-profit that works with provincial education and environmental departments to deliver experiential learning projects, currently reaches about one-third of schools in the province.

“Climate change is not a debate anymore,” says The Gaia Project’s interim executive director, Geoff MacDonald. “With students, we want to give them an opportunity to take action instead of feeding fear … and provide them with solutions and make connections to carbon reduction.”

The urgency is not lost on students.

“As you learn more about the impacts [of climate change], you realize how disastrous it is going to be if we don’t act on it,” says Bi.

Jennifer Lewington is an intrepid reporter and writes regularly on many topics, including business school news.

The post Are Canadian schools raising climate-literate citizens? appeared first on Corporate Knights.

Siegel’s expertise is in healthy buildings, and he is cross-appointed to U of T’s public health faculty. He points out that ventilation systems, which consume a lot of energy, tend to be neglected, particularly in institutional buildings, like schools.

But the COVID-19 pandemic has flipped this story on its head, especially when children, teens and teachers began venturing back into schools in the fall. Suddenly, robust ventilation systems that bring fresh air into schools are regarded as a critical defence – along with masks and social distancing – against the airborne transmission of the coronavirus.

The question, of course, is how to improve those systems. In most public boards, the portfolio of schools is extremely diverse, in size, shape, upkeep, age, traffic levels and so on. Some are newer and well designed, and others are old and neglected. For many institutions, air quality was low on the list of capital priorities pre-COVID. What’s more, adequate ventilation depends on many factors, from whether the windows open to the custodian’s skills in maintaining the mechanical systems. “The right answer,” says Siegel, “is ventilating better, not ventilating more.”

The most straightforward way to heed that advice is to change some basic operational practices. At Canada’s largest public board, for example, facilities officials have come up with a series of practical moves to boost the circulation of fresh air: starting exhaust fans two hours before school and running them for longer after the kids leave, as well as cleaning and replacing filters and air-supply grates more frequently. “If mechanical ventilation is not available,” says Toronto District School Board spokesperson Ryan Bird, “[we will] open windows to provide outdoor air.”

Tye Farrow, a Toronto architect who specializes in healthy buildings, has recommended a more aggressive set of fixes to his school clients, which tend to be independent academies. Several of the changes are based on the measures hospitals use to contain airborne disease transmission. These include installing ultraviolet-C lighting, a disinfectant, and MERV-13 filters; accelerating the circulation of fresh air; and employing what Farrow describes as the “submarine” approach to indoor space – that is, segmenting buildings into “bubbles” to limit the spread of the virus.

He also has urged school clients to invest in so-called bipolar ionization systems, which are magnetic devices installed in the HVAC system. They add a small charge to air passing through the ducts. The charge, he explains, causes microscopic particles to bind to larger airborne particles that will, in turn, be trapped by the MERV-13 filters. “We’ve advised all our clients to put it in their systems,” he says, adding that many began planning mitigation measures in the spring.

Many other building owners have taken similar steps. Property management firms for months have been making significant investments in heavy-duty air filters and the ionization systems for clients that range from office building landlords to movie theatre operators, according to a July report from Bloomberg, which noted that HVAC giants like Honeywell and Carrier have seen a surge in demand.

Yet Siegel is skeptical about some manufacturers’ claims about the virus-catching and -killing properties of these devices. “[Bipolar ionization] has been available for decades,” he says. “Why are there no independent high-quality journal articles on them? A reasonable guess is that the manufacturers don’t want to pay for this research because they already know the answer – they don’t really work.”

Farrow, however, adds another layer: when he’s checked in with school clients that have taken steps to improve ventilation, they tell him the students and staff seem relaxed and happy to be back, amidst the more general sense of unease in the public system. While private schools clearly have more resources to invest in altering the indoor environment, Farrow points out that mental-health and stress-related disorders, now increasingly common, are actually part of the pandemic, not just a byproduct of it. Indeed, besides the changes in air quality, he observes that school settings generally can either stoke or mitigate all that ambient anxiety.

There is, in fact, a body of emerging research about the relationship between design, health, mental health and even academic performance. Anyone who’s had to labour through a long afternoon meeting or a dull lecture in a dreary and airless breakout room or classroom understands the connection.

In the other direction, a Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory literature review noted that increased ventilation was linked to reduced prevalence of respiratory disease and student absenteeism, for example. And a 2014 University of New South Wales study found improved test scores in a Texas school district that had made investments to improve indoor air quality.

Others have focused on the educational and psychological benefits to students in classrooms of natural light, fresh air, non-linear shapes and natural materials, especially wood. Patrick Chouinard, CEO of Element5, an Ontario-based engineered wood manufacturer, points to the growing number of schools in Europe and the U.K. that make extensive use of cross-laminated timber and glulam (an abbreviation of “glued laminated timber”) wooden beams. He’s not a disinterested observer, of course, but few would argue that drywall or concrete block walls are preferable. “The advantage of wood is the natural human connection to the material,” he says. “Why are we not building our schools in Canada that way?” (Farrow’s educational clients are making such design choices, but they tend to be situated in independent or private schools.)

For Jeffrey Siegel, who has advocated for improved regulations and standards on indoor air quality, the pandemic presents an important opportunity to build healthier and better school buildings. As he puts it, “This is definitely a moment.”

The post The push to pump fresh air into schools appeared first on Corporate Knights.

Meanwhile, COVID has thrown a spotlight on the industry’s more unseemly practices. In Bangladesh, for example, suppliers lost millions when big fashion players didn’t pay for the orders they cancelled when the pandemic began. Factories were forced to close, leaving millions of workers on the curb without wages for completed orders, or jobs. 

At the end of March, one non-profit stepped in to help. Remake, whose mission is “to make fashion a force for good,” started an online campaign under the hashtag #PayUp to pressure fashion brands to pay for their fulfilled orders. Adidas, H&M, The Gap and Lululemon were among those that were pressured into honouring their contracts, but The Children’s Place, Urban Outfitters and TJX, which owns Marshalls, Winners and HomeSense in Canada, have not yet publicly committed to paying. 

The fashion industry is at a crossroads: either slash costs by doubling down on unsustainable practices that hurt workers and the environment or ramp up sustainability pledges made before the pandemic. 

“The question is now, how do we build back better?” says Michael Stanley-Jones, co-secretary of the United Nations Alliance for Sustainable Fashion, in a story for the UN Environment Programme’s website.  “We need to map the value chain and identify opportunities to limit the negative environmental and social impacts of the fashion industry while building in accountability and transparency.”

If one of the world’s dirtiest industries is going to clean up its act, then fashion schools must get in on the ground floor. Is the next generation of designers, merchandisers, buyers and managers being trained for the transition? 

***

If the $2.4 trillion fashion industry were a country, it would be the world’s seventh largest economy. It’s also considered one of the world’s dirtiest industries, responsible for 10% of global carbon emissions. The industry guzzles about 79 billion cubic metres of fresh water annually, making it the second-largest water polluter and consumer. Though apparel’s environmental and social impacts have long been criticized, COVID-19 unequivocally confirmed the need for the fashion industry to take action. Business as usual is no longer an option – and fashion’s supply chains, labour practices, water use and textile waste are all in need of makeovers. 

Are fashion schools keeping up? 

Currently, only a handful of sustainable fashion study programs exist, with just two offered in Canada. Marilyn McNeil-Morin, program director at George Brown College’s Fashion Exchange Program in Toronto, was at the centre of designing the program when it launched in 2016. She foresaw the “forces of change and recognized that the school needs to meet them ahead of time.”

McNeil-Morin explains that sustainability isn’t just about greener fabric choices. “The way the program is constructed is that it looks at the whole supply chain. Sustainability is not just fixing the environmental impacts of fashion, but also labour and social impacts,” she says. For example, classes focus on principles of accountability in the ethical sourcing of raw materials and sustainability challenges in apparel production by looking at labour logistics and production standards. 

There’s a push-and-pull tension in this space. Though McNeil-Morin suggests the desire to clean up the fashion market is growing on both the production and consumption sides, Pulse of the Fashion Industry 2019 tells a different story. The report – by the Global Fashion Agenda, Boston Consulting Group and the Sustainable Apparel Coalition – found that progress on sustainability slowed by a third in 2018. 

“Unless the current trend…improves,” the authors write, “fashion will continue to be a net contributor to climate change.” 

Sabine Weber, a professor in Seneca College’s School of Fashion in Toronto, offers a course on fashion sustainability but says there’s a shortage of trained people to lead sustainable initiatives. It’s a problem she hopes that classes like hers can help solve. She says sustainability is still “an abstract concept” for most fashion students and industry professionals, and it has to be made relatable by breaking down the supply chain. How does textile waste affect the planet? How can we reduce, reuse, recycle and join the circular economy? How can we push for quality clothing that people will want to keep longer? These are all questions she addresses with her students. 

“Designers determine the life cycle of a garment,” Weber says, “and they can see what the life of a garment will be at the end of its design and after the consumer is done with it.” Training students to design a garment so it can be easily recycled or upcycled helps ensure that tomorrow’s apparel companies are contributing to a circular economy. 

Suad Ali is a third-year Fashion Business Management student at Seneca College’s Newnham Campus. She says she learned about the detrimental effects of fashion in school. “[It] changed the way I think … Now I want to work in recycling and upcycling materials,” she says. 

Only a few students from her program are seriously incorporating elements of sustainability into their post-graduation business plans, Ali says, adding that most are resigned to the status quo. “That’s why we need more courses to keep reminding people of the importance of sustainability.”

Other schools putting sustainability at the core of their fashion design, production and business programs include Lethbridge College in Alberta and the London College of Fashion. But there are still far too few of them to flip the industry on its head, advocates say. 

A lot of the work going into educating the public, students and brands about the importance of sustainability in fashion is coming from outside of school systems. The Ellen MacArthur Foundation has been working with a number of brands and universities to encourage a transition to a circular economy, recognizing the need to move away from a “take-make-waste” model of production and consumption. Through online resources and collaboration with universities around the world, such as the University of Montreal and the University of Chile, the foundation equips students with the knowledge and skills to build a society and economy with the concepts of sustainability and a circular economy at the core of their values. 

Still, more schools and universities need to recognize the future of business and forces of change and train students accordingly. 

“I attended the Copenhagen Fashion Summit [last May], and I was so surprised to see that education leaders were still only talking about introducing sustainability courses. At this point, we need interest at the program stage, not just the course stage,” McNeil-Morin says. 

Regenerative fabrics, upcycling, recycling, as well as slow-fashion business models all must become central to fashion programs so that students can bring these practices to the industry when they graduate. With scientists suggesting that we have 10 years left to bend the climate crisis curve, we need all hands on deck – including the next generation of fashion industry leaders. 

Shreya Kalra is a journalist based in Toronto writing on the environment, women, children and social issues.

The post Cleaning up fast fashion starts in the classroom appeared first on Corporate Knights.

“Ohio’s LEED schools have outperformed baseline energy performance by 34 per cent, almost 200,000 tons of construction waste has been diverted from landfills and occupants report improved educational outcomes,” says Tyler Steele from the Ohio chapter of the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC).

So why is the state set to pass a non-binding resolution demanding that LEED no longer be used by government agencies?

The first iteration of LEED was unveiled in 1998, but it took several years for it to pick up steam. The standard has since grown so popular that it is often viewed by the general public as synonymous with the concept of green buildings. Hundreds of jurisdictions across North America provide tax and other incentives to encourage LEED construction, while over 30 states and provinces encourage or require it for all new public buildings. The standard has proved popular overseas as well, including a recent burst of certification in the Middle East. Yet despite these successes, the USGBC has managed to antagonize a number of powerful interests: the timber, chemical and plastics industries.

One of the criteria considered by the LEED standard concerns the sourcing of wood. It has only ever recognized Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) wood as qualifying for its “environmentally responsible forest management” credit, despite a four-year campaign by the Sustainable Forestry Initiative (SFI) to be considered as well. The American Forest and Paper Association launched SFI in 1994 as an industry-friendly antidote to FSC, arguing that failing to include SFI would hurt U.S. forestry jobs.

Seventy-nine members of Congress, along with 12 governors, threw their support behind the SFI’s lobbying effort, which was defeated by USGBC members in 2010. Upon defeat, SFI chief executive Kathy Abusow called for companies to ignore the point deducted for using SFI-certified products in LEED buildings to “demonstrate their pride and support for North American forests, communities, and jobs.”

As the timber industry began to encounter resistance from the USGBC, it cast around for an alternative ratings system. Based on a British green buildings rating system called BREEAM, the Green Globes was launched in Canada and licensed for use in the United States in 2004. Founded by former Louisiana Pacific lumber executive Ward Hubbell, the Green Building Initiative (GBI) – the licensed operator of Green Globes in the U.S. – quickly drew substantial support from the chemical and forestry industries.

For the past several years the anti-LEED coalition has assembled a series of significant victories, starting in 2011 with an executive order from the Tea Party-friendly governor of Maine, Paul LePage. While not explicitly banning LEED, it only allowed for green building standards that recognized SFI, the American Tree Farm System and FSC equally. The “wood wars” quickly spread to Georgia, Alabama, North Carolina and several other states.

Discounting the fact that LEED does award points for locally sourced materials, which can include non-FSC wood, the anti-American messaging proved very successful at the state level. During the debate in North Carolina, Weyerhaeuser spokesperson Nancy Thompson condemned the LEED program as “an inherent discrimination of North Carolina lumber.”

State and federal lobbying efforts expanded to include the plastics and chemical industries as well. The big catalyst for this was the long debate – and eventual adoption – of a material transparency credit in LEED version 4. “Before that there were already people saying GBI was going to close down,” says Scot Horst, senior vice-president of the LEED program. But the prospect of mandatory disclosure of material components was viewed as unacceptable by organizations such as the Vinyl Institute, which engendered new interest in promoting Green Globes.

Testifying before the Ohio state house in January, Allen Blakey, vice-president of industry and government affairs at the Vinyl Institute, belittled the transparency credit as a prime example of “discriminatory and disparaging treatment of vinyl in LEED credits.”

The American High-Performance Buildings Coalition (AHPBC), led by the American Chemistry Council and backed by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, was created to push for federal anti-LEED legislation. “Our mission is to support and promote green building codes, standards, rating systems, and credits and we believe the best systems will be developed in conformance with ANSI or ISO-type processes,” Steve Russell, vice-president of plastics for the American Chemistry Council, stated in a conference call announcing the coalition in 2012. It worked hard to weaken the proposed transparency credit in the draft LEED v4 standards, an effort that failed last fall. At the same time it was lobbying hard for legislative change to accept Green Globes alongside LEED at the federal and state levels.

ANSI, the American National Standards Institute, has proven key to their strategy. Green Globes is certified by ANSI, while LEED is not. The AHPBC and others have used this to denounce LEED as not being sufficiently consensus-driven, despite the long consultation process and open vote by its 13,000 members in the adoption of each LEED standard. The legislation pending in Ohio, for example, specifically bans any green building certification programs that have not been ANSI-approved. Corporate Knights contributor and architect Lloyd Alter pointed out last year that numerous other well-regarded rankings are not ANSI-approved either, like the popular Energy Star ratings.

With green federal government buildings serving as a key pillar in President Obama’s executive-driven push on sustainability, the AHPBC turned its attention to influencing the U.S. General Services Administration’s review of its building policies that favour LEED use. In a significant victory for AHPBC, the Green Globes certification was approved as equivalent to LEED in October 2013. Several months later, the U.S. Department of Defense also opened its doors to Green Globes.

Not all companies were pleased with the efforts of the AHPBC, including Skanska USA. The American arm of the Swedish construction conglomerate made a high-profile exit from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce over its support of AHPBC in July. Penning an op-ed in the Washington Post, Skanska USA CEO Mike McNally denounced the organization’s efforts to influence the LEED v4 process. “What they want is a standard they can manipulate and weaken,” he wrote. “They are putting their bottom lines first and sustainability second.”

For LEED’s Horst, the issue is not with the Green Globes ranking itself. “While not as rigorous as LEED, it’s a good green building tool,” he says. The problem, for Horst, lies with the GBI’s close ties to industry. Its board still consists of representatives from Weyerhauser, Plum Creek Timber, the Vinyl Institute and other corporate interests, with a similarly composed list of members and supporters. “They support Green Globes because it doesn’t require them to change their practices,” he adds. He points out that by accepting SFI and avoiding the implementation of any similar material transparency, the GBI can’t claim the same stringency as LEED.

In an attempt to reboot their image, LEED fellow and respected green buildings advocate Jerry Yudelson was hired in January to head up the GBI and its Green Globes certification. All ties to founder Ward Hubbell have been cut, he declared in a telephone interview from his office in Portland, Oregon. “I can’t speak to what the organization has done in the past, but I will say that a year from now the board is going to look a lot different,” he states. Yudelson’s plans for the next year involve spreading the message that Green Globes is faster and cheaper, while assuring people that it remains an effective green building standard.

There are plenty of critiques to level at LEED, from the onerous compliance costs to the points allocated for simple steps taken. A green buildings landscape dominated by LEED is not a realistic scenario. “In the end, we want as many green buildings built as possible,” says Elizabeth Heider, chief sustainability officer at Skanska USA. “At the same time, insistence by GBI that there is an equivalency between Green Globes and LEED is just not true,” she says.

A look north over the border provides a blueprint for a less acrimonious relationship between green building ratings systems. The BOMA BESt system, run by the Building Owners and Managers Association of Canada, is loosely based on the original Green Globes methodology. The lower costs, compared to LEED, allow for more buy-in from property managers, including those with existing building stock that weren’t built with green standards in mind.

While not as focused on the holistic approach to green buildings as LEED, BOMA Canada president and CEO Benjamin Shinewald views BOMA BESt as somewhat complementary to LEED. “Our ratings systems are both working towards the same goal of greater efficiency in building management, with ours more focused on existing buildings,” he says. Horst disputes the idea that LEED is mainly interested in new buildings – pointing out that LEED has certified more existing buildings than new ones – but he agrees that there is no antipathy between the two organizations.

In the U.S., meanwhile, Green Globes-certified projects currently only constitute about 2 to 4 per cent of green buildings. Yudelson is confident that will expand in the coming year. “The more choices the better,” he says, citing that less than 1 per cent of commercial buildings in the U.S. have been certified green.

The post The LEED question appeared first on Corporate Knights.