“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.

“Movement is happening, but it is all about accelerating change,” says John Robinson, the University of Toronto’s presidential advisor on the environment, climate change and sustainability, emphasizing the urgency of the moment. A sustainability scholar who heads a university committee of senior administrators, faculty, students and staff, Robinson warns that “the longer we take, the worse the consequences.”

U of T embodies both the progress and the unfinished agenda to date. The university promises a net-zero-emissions campus by 2050 and a 40% reduction in the carbon footprint of its investment portfolio by 2030. Nudged by Robinson’s committee, the campus serves as a “living lab” for upper-year students to work on real problems identified by university departments. So far, 100 students participate, with 1,000 students a year expected over time. U of T is also constructing a new 14-storey timber-framed academic tower and a 750-bed residence built to “passive house” standards that limit energy demand to a fraction of what is used in a conventional building.

In academic innovation, Robinson’s committee and university departments are creating curricular and co-curricular pathways for any student to earn sustainability credentials in or outside the classroom.

“We are trying to make sustainability a defining characteristic of U of T,” Robinson says.

Equally ambitious is the University of British Columbia, which in 2020 placed first in Canada and seventh globally in the Times Higher Education Impact Rankings of commitment to the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

In a 2019 victory for student activists, UBC committed to full divestment of fossil fuel endowment investments “as soon as possible,” promised carbon neutrality by 2050, and declared a climate emergency. Last June, UBC president Santa Ono was named to lead the University Climate Change Coalition – with 22 research universities in Canada, the United States and Mexico promising accelerated efforts.

“There is so much work to do and so much [information] to share; competition only gets you so far,” Ono says. “The enormity of the climate change threat to humanity is so large that the sooner we can get away from that to open sharing of information and very strategic collaboration – the sooner we get there the better.”

He views students as allies. “We have learned from them, not only regarding the urgency of divestment but also how they view the world, what they would like to see in the curriculum and what kinds of projects they would like to work on.”

Michelle Marcus, a fourth-year environmental science student and divestment lead with Climate Justice UBC (formerly UBCC350), says that “student leadership has been critical to getting UBC to the place it is at, so continuing to empower and support students is going to be critical.” For example, Climate Hub was introduced in 2018 for university-funded, student-driven projects (for which they receive pay or course credits) on environmental and social justice issues.

Sustainability increasingly looms large in the curriculum. Montreal’s Concordia University, which aims to end fossil fuel endowment investments by 2025, last year joined the UN’s Decade of Action campaign to achieve the 17 SDGs by 2030. The university estimates that 82% of departments now offer sustainability content, up from 65% five years ago. Meanwhile, Concordia’s John Molson School of Business (JMSB) plans to add social and environmental responsibility to its core undergraduate curriculum starting this fall.

“We have learned from students, not only regarding the urgency of divestment but also how they see the world.”
– UBC president Santa Ono

“Right now, what is missing is student understanding about the core importance of sustainability issues,” says Jooseop Lim, associate dean of undergraduate programs. The goal, says JMSB dean Anne-Marie Croteau, is to develop “a reflex among students and faculty to think about sustainability issues and to be mindful of it.”

Kamloops university earns platinum for going green

As of September, all students at Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops, B.C., must choose a course (from a menu of more than 5O) tied to citizenship, one of eight university learning outcomes. They learn about ethical decision-making “by considering the social, economic and ecological side effects of everyday actions,” according to a TRU spokeswoman.

One of two Canadian universities with platinum ranking from the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education, TRU aspires to be carbon neutral, without offsets, by 2030. In 2022, the university will break ground on a 10-year campus electrification project to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 90%. TRU hopes to divert 95% of campus waste from landfill in five years, up from 71% currently, with single-use items like coffee cups eliminated by 2025.

“As a society we have made convenience too important, and we have finally come to the realization that it is just a huge waste issue,” says TRU manager of sustainability programs James Gordon. “We are going to start turning that clock back.”

Colleges are eager to be change-makers too

In 2020, Ontario’s Mohawk College and seven other climate-conscious institutions staked out a national role to train graduates for a sustainable, post-pandemic recovery. “Now is the time … to make sure that it is a resilient recovery and that there is a move to a low-carbon, circular and socially inclusive economy,” says Mohawk president Ron McKerlie, of the mandate of the Canadian Colleges for a Resilient Recovery (CCRR). “There is no point putting billions into infrastructure without at the same time fixing some of the issues we have around climate change.”
CCRR takes its cue from the independent Task Force for a Resilient Recovery that last year urged federal government and industry support for building retrofits, clean energy, cleantech and zero-emission vehicles.

“This is too big an issue for us to tackle on our own,” McKerlie says. Each institution plays to its strength – Mohawk’s Centre for Climate Change Management is a hub for regional emission reduction – while sharing relevant curricula for a post-pandemic recovery. The City School, a successful Mohawk pilot project that retrains unemployed welfare recipients, will soon roll out nationally with other colleges.

“This is our chance to make a meaningful difference to the Canadian economy,” says McKerlie, who predicts that 50,000 workers could be retrained in a couple of years. “If we get the colleges involved, and there is some funding to go with it, we can increase this number significantly.”

College campuses are also test beds for sustainability.

Ontario’s Sheridan College is ahead of schedule to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 50% by 2030. Over the past decade, Sheridan has cut energy use per student by 35% and, since committing to zero waste in 2014, has slashed the volume of waste going to landfill by 54%.

Sheridan is one of the first North American institutions to set European-style energy-performance specifications for new buildings, says sustainability director Herb Sinnock. “At the time, we were looking at German building ratings for [low] annual energy consumption, and we felt if Germany and Austria can do it, we can too,” he says. In 2017, a second wing added to a campus building in Mississauga recorded 50% higher energy efficiency compared to the first wing built six years earlier.

Still, experts say the necessary heavy lifting is just beginning.

“We are definitely seeing a lot of effort, there is no doubt of that,” says Livia Bizikova, the lead for monitoring and governance at the Winnipeg-based International Institute for Sustainable Development. “The challenge is that there are so many things to do, and the question is more ‘Is the effort enough to get to the path to improve sustainability significantly?’”

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Of course, when pitching to prospective students, the east-coast Australia school highlights sustainability and responsibility as two core values (the third is its Asia-focused location) in curriculum and research; it just sees no need to attach an adjective to the MBA.

“We have made a conscious decision that we believe every MBA should be a sustainable MBA,” says Stephanie Schleimer, Griffith’s MBA director, thrilled that her school is number one for the first time on the Corporate Knights Better World MBA ranking.

“We don’t call our courses fancy names, either, because we believe a course in strategy should be all about responsible strategy and it should be all about total shared values,” she says. “We teach all these different things that we believe should just be the standard.”

Climbing from fifth place on last year’s Better World MBA ranking, Griffith Business School scored higher on every key measure: content, research publications and citations, as well as gender and racial diversity. The school collaborates with all 16 research centres at Griffith University and has responsibility for half of them.

Other schools that did well in the ranking also enriched their course content, research and hiring practices consistent with the United Nations’ 17 Sustainable Development Goals for 2030.

“We have made a conscious decision that we believe every MBA should be
a sustainable MBA.”

–Stephanie Schleimer, Griffith’s MBA director

For example, Duquesne University’s Palumbo-Donahue School of Business jumped to fourth spot this year from 28th in 2019, partly by adding sustainability to more core courses and recording growth in faculty publications and citations. The school offers a full-time MBA in Sustainable Business Practices program alongside a more conventional MBA.

“I really see a deepening of the focus, and every year we are looking to make improvements to adjust the content to make it better and keep it fresh,” says Karen Russo Donovan, the school’s associate dean of graduate programs and executive education. Moreover, she notes, “we have consistently published cutting-edge research on the broad topics of sustainability, as defined by Corporate Knights, in top journals.”

One of Palumbo-Donahue’s widely cited researchers is Robert Sroufe, a professor of sustainability, operations and supply chain management, whose work on sustainable building renovation has informed the school’s multimillion-dollar renewal. “We have monitors and dashboards throughout the building [gathering data on energy conservation, air quality and other measures], and the students can utilize that information as a living lab for analytics and management,” Donovan says.

Research also explains a rise in the ranking for two Canadian schools: the University of Guelph’s Lang School of Business and Economics and Ryerson University’s Ted Rogers School of Management placed sixth and eight respectively, up from 18 and 37 respectively in 2019.

Over the past year, Lang added research chairs in the business of food, entrepreneurship and sports management, with others pending in leadership, finance and marketing. Sustainability is not in the chair titles, but sustainable food systems, social enterprise and gender equity are themes of the research agendas, says MBA graduate coordinator Rumina Dhalla.

Lang students send their own message, too, with 70% enrolled in sustainable commerce, one of three MBA program streams.

When the Rogers School cracked the Better World ranking two years ago, faculty took a closer look at where sustainability appears in curriculum and research. “We were already doing it, but we weren’t keeping track of it, and we weren’t writing it down,” says Donna Smith, graduate program director of the MBA program. “That is what led us to capture what we were doing and move it forward.”

This fall, the school introduced a revamped MBA based on “leading for performance and well-being” in diversity, technology, innovation and entrepreneurship, with students taught about ethical corporate governance, socially responsible decision-making and environmental stewardship.

Ozgur Turetken, associate dean of research, says the school has hired about 50 new research-oriented faculty members over the past five years, with sustainable management a possible focus for future hires.

Despite school efforts, student advocates demand deeper commitments.

Business schools “need to talk about things like the triple bottom line, stakeholder capitalism, impact investing and sustainability reporting,” says Gareth Gransaull, past president of Ivey Business School’s student-run Social Impact Club at Western University. “We also need to introduce and have honest conversations about issues that are more controversial,” he adds, citing tax reform, corporate ethics, anti-racism initiatives and “greenwashing.”

Other schools have updated curriculum. Last fall, HEC Montréal added mandatory content on sustainable development in undergraduate and MBA programs, a spokesperson says, adding that the school is now weighing the possibility of a voluntary commitment by professors to embed sustainable development and social responsibility in all courses.

A comprehensive approach has merit, says Melody Tim Yen, a master of science student in supply-chain management at HEC and the former president of Groupe HumaniTerre, an on-campus sustainability advocacy organization.

“It’s the difference between vertical and horizontal markets,” she says. “Sustainability should be a horizontal component found in each vertical [course topic].”

To find out how the top 40 schools ranked, click here.

Correction: An earlier version of this story listed the University of Guelph’s Lang School of Business and Economics and Ryerson University’s Ted Rogers School of Management in fifth and sixth place respectively. They ranked sixth and eighth.

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“What I am really passionate about is ensuring this transition [to a low-carbon economy] is a just one and there is economic opportunity for everyone in this energy transition,” says De Luna, whose people-oriented outlook is rooted in experience. Growing up in Windsor, Ontario, in a family of Filipino immigrants to Canada, he witnessed the devastating 2008/2009 recession that eviscerated a once-vibrant community dependent on car manufacturing. His father was among thousands laid off. “The theme of economic prosperity really resonates with me, and today, when I look at Alberta and our energy sector, that really resonates with me again,” he says.

As director of NRC’s Materials for Clean Fuels Challenge program, with a budget of $57 million over seven years, De Luna works with research scientists and the oil, gas and petrochemicals industry to identify promising technologies to reduce CO2 emissions. After an exploratory phase ends in 2021, the program will select the most promising candidates that, by 2026, could leave the lab for adoption by energy companies and private investors.

A co-founder of a venture to convert carbon dioxide into ethylene, De Luna likens his NRC role to a venture capitalist who backs promising ideas that generate returns in several years. In his case, he says, he looks for ideas with global impact. “My return on investment is not necessarily a monetary return. It is the potential for greenhouse-gas-emission reduction.”

Jesse Popp
Indigenous Environmental Stewardship Chair, University of Guelph

Wildlife ecologist Jesse Popp likes to see the whole picture in her research.
A member of Wiikwemkoong Unceded Territory in northern Ontario, she blends Western and Indigenous perspectives into her investigations of declining species and fluctuating wildlife populations.

“All my research takes this ‘two-eyed seeing’ approach to weaving together Indigenous and Western ways of knowing,” says Popp, who in September 2020 became the first Chair in Indigenous Environmental Stewardship at the University of Guelph. “Both are complementary to one another, and you get a better understanding of the world.”

One project is a study of declining moose populations across North America and several regions of Ontario. She applies Western scientific methods while gathering insights from Indigenous Elders and knowledge holders on changing land use and environmental conditions.

“Moose are a culturally important species to many First Nations,” Popp says. “We are basically bringing together Indigenous and Western knowledge systems to try and understand why the moose populations are declining and how that is impacting the environment and the communities that rely on moose.”

An emerging scholar, Popp previously held a Canada Research Chair (Tier 2) in Indigenous Environmental Science at Mount Allison University and is a current recipient of a Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council grant (2018–2023) to study the influence of natural and man-made pollutants on wildlife diversity and populations.

Early in her career, Popp questioned the exclusion of Indigenous perspectives in Western scientific research. That led her to develop Laurentian University’s first course in biology with Indigenous perspectives and history to create a whole picture of the discipline.

Her commitment to “two-eyed” research has only deepened, adding to her perspective on sustainability.
“If we respect our [interpersonal] relations, if we are responsible and if we are reciprocal, we can in turn live sustainably with the earth.” If so, she adds, “sustainability will come naturally.”

Simon Pek
Assistant professor, University of Victoria Gustavson School of Business

Democracy is under siege but count Simon Pek at the University of Victoria as “cautiously optimistic” about the potential to invigorate democratically run organizations.

In that cause, he wears many hats. An assistant professor of sustainability and organization theory at the university’s Gustavson School of Business since 2017, the 33-year-old won the inaugural UVic President’s Chair, the university’s highest academic honour, for contributions to teaching, research and the wider community. He is also co-chair of Gustavson’s Carbon Neutrality Plus committee to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and is a co-founder and board member of Democracy in Practice, a non-profit that promotes leadership capacity-building.

One of his research interests is the role of democracy in unions, worker-owned firms and cooperatives. Though democratic, these organizations too often wind up with entrenched leadership, leaving little room for new, diverse voices. “They have the same paralysis and problems as many societal governments,” he says.

One remedy, he says, is a democratic lottery to recruit new leaders from a pool of interested individuals. The result is a randomly selected group whose members collaborate on decision-making. “It’s less top-down and more horizontal,” Pek says, and enables added input from women and minorities.

His interest in the gig economy has prompted an examination of alternatives to new business platforms like ride-sharing Uber. “That [model] comes with enormous consequences for workers and communities in particular,” he says. An alternative is a worker-run cooperative whose members decide on practices and profit-sharing.

“I want to broaden what we think of as organizations,” Pek says. “Tons of organizations, not just those for profit, can play a massive role in positively addressing the SDGs.”

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Only a few pioneering schools – and this September add one from Canada – have gone “all in” to replace the conventional master’s in business administration with one that blends social justice, ethics and environmental concerns with principles of finance, accounting and marketing to train a new generation of leaders.

That sustainability-themed MBAs represent only a corner of the business education market is a function of employer demand, says higher education consultant David Wheeler, principal at Sustainable Transitions and a former chair of business and sustainability at York University’s Schulich School of Business.

“Until the major employers are specifying this in their human resources recruitment strategies, nothing will change in the business schools because they are simply serving that market,” he says. School websites, he notes dryly, never quote employers saying, “We came to this leading business school because of what they are doing on sustainability.”

But a new MBA in sustainable innovation this fall at the University of Victoria’s Peter B. Gustavson School of Business attracted Midhat Malik, a sustainable transportation consultant in her mid-20s.

A business undergraduate, Malik values bottom-line considerations but not at the cost of a healthy planet. “It is not one or the other,” she says. “It has to be both.”

In returning to school, Malik wanted a program that met her “desire to lead, think creatively and continue my sustainability journey.” With Gustavson’s 16-month program she thought, “This is it.”

In Victoria, she joins an inaugural cohort of 15 students mostly online because of the coronavirus; a program with slightly larger enrolment for those currently employed is also offered.

The new program replaces an existing MBA and targets those for whom business-as-usual is not an option.

“We have fundamental problems in the world, and business and business schools tend to take a back seat to them,” says Gustavson dean Saul Klein. With the new degree, he adds, “we are very much trying to demonstrate [that] the way to be successful is by doing the right thing. There is no contradiction here.”

In a program delivered in blocks by professors from multiple disciplines, students study responsible and ethical leadership in ways that encourage self-reflection, working in teams, and career development. For each learning block, students complete a project tied to the United Nations’ 17 Sustainable Development Goals.

“That integration within the blocks and across the program is purpose-built and different,” says academic director Cheryl Mitchell. “For me, it is about people understanding their own mindsets, and the capstone project gives them an opportunity to incorporate multiple perspectives to understand wicked problems and complexity.” Future leaders, she adds, need skills to assess broad challenges facing their organizations and must be fluent in the language of diversity and inclusion.

In its redesign, Gustavson sought advice from Vermont’s Grossman School of Business, whose sustainable innovation MBA in 2014 replaced a 40-year-old program. “The world had changed since then, and I felt our programs were really dated,” says Grossman dean Sanjay Sharma.

After overhauling the undergraduate program, Sharma and his colleagues reimagined the year-long MBA, emphasizing business sustainability, global economic trends and entrepreneurial thinking.

The school added or refreshed case studies about local Vermont businesses (including Ben & Jerry’s) and multinationals, recruiting company officials to talk to students. Environmental scientists and lawyers were invited into the classroom to expand discussions beyond the bottom line.

“We are very much trying to demonstrate [that] the way to be successful is by doing the right thing.”

–Gustavson dean Saul Klein

Still, the new degree was not an easy sell, Sharma says. Rival faculties with environmental programs questioned the need, as did some members of the university’s governing board from Wall Street. The proposal “squeaked through,” he says.

Three years ago, though, the same Wall Street leaders returned to Grossman for graduates trained in environmental, social and governance practices, now high-demand areas of corporate reporting. In response, the school added a specialization in impact investing.

“The world changes,” Sharma says wryly.

But is it changing fast enough?

In 2011, when the University of Exeter unveiled its “One Planet” MBA in collaboration with the World Wildlife Fund, triple-bottom-line considerations were new to the boardroom, says Jackie Bagnall, director of what is now the Exeter MBA, since the partnership with WWF ended in 2018.

Sustainability remains integral to Exeter’s curriculum, but with increased focus on solutions, Bagnall says. “We know there is a problem, and it is part of a global, systemic issue in terms of environment, society and government, and we now couch our thinking in terms of responsible leadership.”

Currently, the school partners with the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, a U.K. charity that promotes the social and environmental benefits of the “circular economy,” such as products that generate no waste.

Bagnall hopes the coronavirus will serve as a wake-up call. “What is the world we want to live in, and how does business create that world?” she asks.

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Swiss billionaire, conservationist and pharmaceutical company scion André Hoffmann and his wife, Rosalie, chose to give to INSEAD, a graduate school based in France with locations on four continents, not for a new building or program but for an idea: to reimagine business as a force for good, not just profit.

While the future of post-pandemic giving is uncertain, philanthropic support for business schools to incorporate sustainability is a budding phenomenon.

Since 2003, the California-based Skoll Foundation has pledged US$16 million to Oxford University’s Saïd Business School, which has attracted other donors for teaching and research linked to the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) for 2030.

In Canada, philanthropists Rob and Cheryl McEwen donated $8 million in 2019 to York University’s Schulich School of Business for an environmentally friendly building with a 27-metre-high solar chimney for passive natural ventilation. Last year, the University of Guelph received a $21 million donation for its now-named Gordon S. Lang School of Business and Economics to deepen its commitment to sustainability and corporate social responsibility. Over the past seven years, Goldcorp Inc. pledged $1.8 million to the University of Victoria’s Gustavson School of Business for its Centre for Social and Sustainable Innovation.

“Businesses are talking more about a broader sense of purpose and a stakeholder view of business, which would require them to think about sustainability more generally,” says Gustavson dean Saul Klein. He cites three factors driving the trend: consumer loyalty to businesses with aligned values, corporate interest in social values that resonate with top talent, and investor pressure on businesses to demonstrate long-run sustainability.

For Hoffmann, an INSEAD alumni, the sustainability-focused gift was rooted in his wish to modernize an outdated view that “business is business,” defined by profit.

The vice-chairman of Roche Holding, which includes the Hoffmann-La Roche pharmaceutical company founded by his great-grandfather, told Corporate Knights, “I felt there needed to be some sort of action to make sure that we come back to a more respectful type of society, in particular to measure the impact that companies are having on the planet.”

With the Hoffmann gift, the largest individual donation in INSEAD’s history, the school established the Hoffmann Global Institute for Business and Society to explore sustainability, broadly defined, including wealth inequality and the role of business in society, as reflected in the UN SDGs.

“What we are trying to do with the institute is to change the norm,” says Hoffmann.

The institute promotes cross-disciplinary innovation in teaching and research and collaborates with businesses and non-profit organizations to encourage progressive practices. “The vision we have is of business that integrates societal progress in their value chain,” says executive director Katell Le Goulven, with progress measured against the UN goals. The Hoffmann gift, she adds, enables the school to take its business and society agenda to “the next level of impact.”

“What we are trying to do with the institute is to change the norm.”

—André Hoffmann

In its catalyst role, the institute piloted a “Master Strategy Day” (now embedded in the core MBA curriculum) for students to apply classroom theory to the real world. Last year, students assisted healthcare clinics in South Africa to scale up services to underserved areas over the next 10 years, with the institute funding students to travel to work directly with the nurse-run clinics.

At Oxford’s Saïd, dean Peter Tufano says mutual interest fuels donor support for sustainability. “On our side, we are bringing intellectual resources, thought leadership and research, and we embed that into our curriculum and executive education,” he says. “On their side, they are seeing us as a channel for change.”

Last year, Tufano announced the Oxford Initiative on AIxSDGs, partly funded by Microsoft, Google and Facebook, to explore the role of artificial intelligence in advancing the UN sustainability goals.

Sometimes, the environmental profile of a building itself attracts top donors.

For example, Schulich’s new graduate study and research building (named for Rob and Cheryl McEwen) is a showcase for low-energy, advanced environmental design.

“Its simplicity is very striking,” says McEwen, the chairman of McEwen Mining who with his wife has donated more than $60 million to healthcare and education causes. “This could be a model for many buildings in the country where we have very large energy loads to survive the winter and sometimes in summer. This building does it easily without the infrastructure of other buildings.”

Finding the right match with a donor is critical, warns Julia Christensen Hughes, dean of Guelph’s business school when Stu Lang chose to honour his late father, Gordon. “We absolutely pledged to look for donors whose values aligned with our own,” she says of her school, which incorporated sustainability into its mission a decade ago. The Lang gift, for example, supports new research chairs and scholarships with sustainability themes.

Christensen Hughes sees potential for growing donor interest but also cautions, “We are still in the early days.”

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

The post Sustainability-minded donors are becoming agents of change appeared first on Corporate Knights.

“I was applying for a lot of jobs and not getting anywhere,” says Skelton, a sociology undergraduate with a work internship in Washington, D.C., and teaching experience in Asia.

She decided to return to school for a graduate degree, spotting an intriguing program at the University of Calgary. A 16-month Master of Science in Sustainable Energy Development, offered jointly by Haskayne School of Business, Schulich School of Engineering and the university’s faculties of Law and Environmental Design, hit the right notes with its interdisciplinary approach to sustainable energy.

Across Canada, business schools and other faculties are joining forces to deliver new academic experiences that incorporate cross-disciplinary perspectives, hands-on projects, real-world applications and an emphasis on sustainability.

“We have huge problems in the world, and we have to get busy and all work together,” says Irene Herremans, a professor at Haskayne and Calgary’s Faculty of Environmental Design, with the Sustainable Energy Development program. “Twenty years ago, we didn’t talk much about sustainability,” she says. “Now when the students come in, they don’t know the ‘ins and outs,’ but they know we need to do something.”

The master’s program recruits from business, engineering, environmental studies and the humanities, enabling students from diverse disciplines to work on a required capstone project.
In 2017, one team worked with African non-profit groups to install a solar power system in a village in Burkina Faso, enabling local women to expand their shea butter cooperative.

The team-based, real-world focus “made me look at challenges differently,” says Lucas Barr, a geotechnical engineering consultant who joined the program at 37 for a career pivot.

After graduation, he joined Canada’s Oil Sands Innovation Alliance, an industry group working to make petroleum extraction from bitumen cleaner. As senior technical advisor for tailings, Barr works to promote innovation and research on oil sands cleanup.

Like Barr, Skelton used her master’s degree to head in a new direction.

From her 2017 thesis project, she founded a Calgary-based social enterprise to promote crowdfunding of sustainable projects. Through Budfunding, Skelton organizes a biannual “sustainability expo” for environmentally conscious vendors and promotes “conscious consumerism” education initiatives.

She says the interdisciplinary master’s program, with out-of-classroom experiential learning on sustainability and Indigenous issues, taught her to see problems differently. “Creativity is what solves problems,” she says. “If you are just coming at something from one perspective it can be a lot harder.”

Stirring sustainability into food management at Guelph

A horizon-expanding experience is also what Jordan Legeard, a commerce undergrad at the University of Guelph’s Lang School of Business and Economics, gained from a one-semester, multidisciplinary course in restaurant operations management.

Hotel and food majors in Lang’s School of Hospitality, Food and Tourism Management work with nutrition students in the College of Social and Applied Human Sciences to run a LEAF-certified “green” on-campus restaurant, with real customers at lunchtime.

Six years ago, the course made sustainability an explicit focus, including banning plastic straws, switching to cloth napkins and auditing the waste of complimentary water and bread. Students learn to measure the nutritional impact of food and analyze the life cycle of restaurant food, including the carbon footprint.

Third-year commerce student Adriana Ovalle says working with nutrition students taught her a valuable lesson for a planned career in hotel management. “You are going to end up working with people who come from totally different disciplines,” she says. “The course opened my mind to things [nutrition students] know compared to what I know.”

The experience also heightened her interest in sustainability.

That raised awareness is essential for a changing job market, says Statia Elliot, interim associate dean of external relations at the Lang School and former director of the hospitality school.

“Restaurants today are looking for big changes and hiring sustainability coordinators,” she says. “Our graduates have the knowledge and understanding to move the needle forward [on sustainable practices].”

Mixing specialities at McMaster

Elsewhere, sustainability is gaining traction through new, multidisciplinary course offerings.

In 2014, McMaster introduced an Interdisciplinary Minor in Sustainability, for which students could choose among 58 courses. It now includes 73 eligible courses, representing the fourth-largest minor by enrolment at the Hamilton university. This year, 39 students graduated with the minor, up from three in 2015, not counting those who took the minor without officially adding it to their transcripts.

No one faculty dominates the enrolment profile, ensuring students from different disciplines work together on real-life projects.

“Sustainability is a complex problem, and we need interdisciplinary learning to tackle complex problems and sustainable solutions,” says Kate Whalen, senior manager of academic sustainability programs at McMaster. “Our mission is to inspire in all students a desire for continued learning through experiential education related to sustainability.”

Some in-class projects take on lives of their own after students complete the minor.

Last fall, Sabrina Dasouki and a diverse team of students in the minor looked for ideas to promote positive behavioural change on the environment. Knowing that only 10% of plastic waste is recycled in Canada, her team developed a kit of reusable eating tools made of bamboo to replace throwaway plastic utensils.

Once classes wrapped up, Dasouki turned the kit concept into a start-up. In November 2019, the 23-year-old made her first sale of the Essential Utensils kit, to the McMaster University Campus Store.

She says the learning experience of the sustainability minor was unlike conventional discipline-based programs. In the minor, student teams with diverse academic backgrounds worked through their differences to solve a problem.

Dasouki would like to see an interdisciplinary component to all undergraduate programs. “It is the closest thing that will get you to real life.”

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

A version of this story appeared in the Winter Issue of Corporate Knights.

The post Joining academic forces generates a win for sustainability appeared first on Corporate Knights.

Much heavy lifting remains, but sustainability-linked topics are increasingly being integrated into core and elective courses at business schools – an encouraging development as Corporate Knights publishes its 2019 “Better World” MBA global rankings. This year, 146 schools (up from 141 in 2018) were evaluated for their sustainability performance, based on publicly available data, on faculty research, citations in top journals, core course content and relevant research institutes and centres.

“Now more than ever is the best time to be involved in this area,” says Frederik Dahlmann, associate professor of strategy and sustainability at the Warwick Business School, which retained top spot in the Better World rankings for the second year in a row.

Dahlmann praises an earlier generation of scholars as “groundbreakers” who raised sustainability as a legitimate topic for leading academic journals.

“They have been championing research on sustainability directly as editors of those [academic] journals or through special issues,” he says. “I think there is a two-way recognition now that mainstream management journals have to be a bit more responsive to those wider needs, beyond what is typically seen as management issues.”

Research collaboration across disciplines is another growing phenomenon. York University’s Schulich School of Business, which moved into sole possession of second place in this year’s rankings, highlights the large number of its faculty, 46 in all and from diverse disciplines, who participated in research reviewed in the Better World analysis.

These professors account for more than half of Schulich’s full-time tenure stream, according to a school spokesman, drawn from marketing, entrepreneurship and supply chain management, not just ethics and corporate social responsibility.

At Duquesne University’s Palumbo-Donahue School of Business, with an MBA in sustainable business practices that dates to 2007, Murrin Chair of Global Competitiveness Robert Sroufe also sees momentum. “There are more special designations for groups and professional societies that are looking at sustainability,” he says, along with a growing number of journal proposal calls for contributions exploring the United Nation’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals.

In July, Management Science announced plans for a special issue on business and climate change, commenting that “far too little research is being conducted to provide the critical insights that companies and managers need” to respond to global warming.

Schools are also looking to up their game to teach the next generation of leaders.

Palumbo-Donahue, for example, is turning its building into a “living laboratory” to measure energy and water efficiency, air quality and carbon dioxide emissions. This fall, the information will be posted live on a 55-inch television at the school so students, researchers and visitors can see first-hand one building’s environmental impact.

“We are finding our indoor air quality is 2.5 times better than it is outdoors,” says Sroufe, of data collected so far. “Outdoor air quality is a big issue globally, so now we can start challenging people on how do we make this better, indoors and outdoors, while saving money doing it.”

Changes are also coming to the classroom, with new or enhanced sustainability content in core and elective courses.

This year, the University of Guelph’s Gordon S. Lang School of Business and Economics introduced a required first-year MBA course, Business Fundamentals, to explore sustainable development, ethical management, cross-cultural management and diversity. New course electives are also planned for not-for-profit and municipal government managers to learn about environmental issues.

“It’s an easy sell,” says Rumina Dhalla, corporate social responsibility coordinator at Lang and coordinator of the MBA graduate program. “The MBA faculty members are very keen to be successful and make it interesting.”

Dhalla, who teaches organization studies and sustainable commerce in the Department of Management, also sees demand from two other sources. Students, she says, want to turn their two-year sustainable commerce degrees into “green” careers, while employers are hungry for graduates “with that value added” of sustainability.

Schools, though, take different approaches to teaching sustainability – a specialized track in some MBA programs and the centrepiece of others.

Next fall, the Gustavson School of Business at the University of Victoria plans to introduce a 16-month MBA in sustainable innovation, replacing its current MBA.

Delivering content through an elective or specialization “is putting sustainability in a box,” argues David Dunne, director of Gustavson’s MBA programs. “You need to weave sustainability and technology and innovation into every course so that the finance professor is not teaching [students] how to make a million dollars but is teaching finance for impact and looking at how sustainable investment funds work.”

Despite sustainability’s rising profile, Warwick’s Dahlmann offers a word of caution. “There is a lot more noise now and more general talk about sustainability, but if you look at the numbers on global greenhouse gas emissions, we have a long way to go.”

Jennifer Lewington is a writer and editor on education and urban affairs.

Click here for 2019 Better World MBA Ranking results.

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