What is an environmental management program?
A master in environmental management is an interdisciplinary program that seeks to develop students into first-rate environmental managers who have the ability to create a harmonious balance between the economic and social needs of man, as well as the needs of the environment. With the current times focus on the sustainable use of resources, programs of this type are quite lucrative in the competitive job market. These environmental management programs involve a combination of theoretical coursework and some practical work in which students are taught important environmental management concepts such as climate change, biodiversity, use of renewable energy, management of sustainable energy, environmental audit and environmental impact assessment.
They are programs that primarily attract people interested in the social and natural sciences, as well as those who are passionate about the environment in which they live and ways to improve it. Postgraduates of any master’s degree in environmental management are highly sought after by governments, local authorities, private agencies and environmental consultancies looking to employ them. A postgraduate in environmental management is equipped with the skills to deal with changing environmental needs, as well as the ongoing challenges facing the environment. And they have plenty of options when it comes to career opportunities. Some of the careers available to them include; energy consultants, recycling coordinators, air quality managers, and environmental consultants, to name just a few.
How some universities and business schools present it
In the case of “University of Cambridge. Institute for Sustainability Leadership” introduces the reader who arrives at its website in the following way:
“This course is for you if:
-Understands that climate change affects the role of every professional today and wants to hybridize her skill set to face this challenge.
– You would like to explore real-world design and innovation strategies that can improve long-term organizational and professional resilience.
– You want to sustainably and profitably reconfigure your business model for long-term value and drive change towards a net-zero future.
But no less interesting is what it indicates in terms of the benefit obtained for postgraduates at the end of the course, since it expressly clarifies that they will leave with:
– A real-world understanding of the multifaceted business risks posed by climate change and the strategic opportunities and untapped value that arise from taking action.
– Strategies to hybridize your professional skill set to make climate action a concrete part of your daily role and responsibilities.
– The ability to reconfigure your business model and drive collaborative action to foster long-term resilience and stimulate a triple bottom line of people, profit and planet.
– An action plan to facilitate the transition to net-zero emissions to help you set your organization’s sustainability goals that enable you to lead change in your context and beyond.
Let’s see another outstanding example such as the “Sustainable Development MSc (online) of the University of Sussex”
It refers fundamentally to the contents of the program that it explains as follows:
– Sustainable Development: Science, Technology and Innovation Policies and Policies.
– Policy analysis. Understand the policy-making process.
– Key Perspectives on International Development-
– Democratizing science and technology-
– Globalization and Environment: Capitalism, Ecology and Power.
– Perspectives, Methods and Skills.
– Innovation for Sustainability.
– Market-based solutions for sustainable development: pitfalls and possibilities.
– Decolonizing knowledge for sustainable development.
Climate change escalates business school curriculum
Environmental issues are moving from fringe to mainstream. This has not happened in a day, but is a process that has been taking place over the last few years, and given the dearth of skills and knowledge needed to achieve global net-zero emissions by 2050, many celebrated the news in May that the Billionaire venture capitalist John Doerr had donated $1.1 billion to establish a climate change school at Stanford University.
The new school will focus on a variety of disciplines, from research into new technologies to the study of climate policy. However, he did not mention business skills, leaving plenty of room for the world’s business education programs to fill the gap. There are many spaces that it will still occupy, both in terms of content and in terms of the objectives and mission set by each of the different master’s programs for the environmental specialty.
For all the benefits of the changes, according to a group of academics, business schools have not moved fast enough to do so. “Although evidence of climate change has been emerging for more than four decades,” they wrote in the Harvard Business Review in February, “business schools have been slow to recognize and respond to this existential and urgent problem.”
The paper’s authors, professors at the Business Schools for Climate Leadership, are among those who want to change this. BS4CL is a new European coalition of business schools that was launched ahead of last year’s COP26 climate summit in Glasgow and believes that academic collaboration could help fill the climate change gap in management education.
“Not all schools have the expertise to design courses and some are better placed to draw on expertise from outside of business school, so you can make a great deal by working across institutions,” says Colin Mayer of the University of Oxford Saïd School of Business, one of eight schools in BS4CL (the others are Cambridge Judge, HEC Paris, IE, IESE, IMD, Insead and LBS).
One of the problems is the classification criteria
But lack of experience isn’t the only reason schools struggle to make climate change a central focus of business degrees. Another is that business school rankings, including those of the Financial Times, tend to prioritize salaries, although the FT is progressively increasing the emphasis on broader criteria. This can deter schools from developing courses for students more drawn to global challenges, such as climate change, than making money.
However, the theme of sustainability has become a feature of business master’s curricula in recent years. “The number of courses that have sprung up on this topic has been extraordinary,” says Mayer.
Entrepreneurship education must prioritize the planet and purpose, as well as profit
The University of Exeter Business School has created a comprehensive programme, the One Planet MBA, to help students tackle global challenges such as climate change.
Bruce Usher, professor of practice at Columbia Business School, sees climate change as becoming a more prominent part of the curriculum. “It has become mainstream,” says Usher, who has taught climate finance as an elective since 2009. “It is no longer a fringe topic, so much so that we are working to integrate climate issues into our core courses and not just our electives: that’s a dramatic change.”
The problem, however, is that, unlike Columbia and some others, most schools offer climate change topics only as part of elective courses, according to Mayer. “It’s increasingly integrated into the core course, but the starting point has been that it’s an elective,” he says.
The lack of integration of climate change in courses such as finance, accounting, marketing, and operations has long been a cause for complaint among those pushing for management education to focus on climate change.
Between 1998 and 2012, the Aspen Institute’s Beyond Gray Pinstripes ranking, which assesses sustainability content in school curricula every two years, routinely found that environmental topics were covered as separate modules or electives, but were missing from core MBA programs.
“Your CFO’s office, legal, accounting, procurement and supply chain offices all have to deal with this,” says Mindy Lubber, CEO of Ceres, the sustainable investor network. “No company can meet its net zero goals if it doesn’t incorporate all of those parts of the business.”
Business schools must be at the forefront of the changes taking place, not behind the scenes
Lubber would also like to see schools offer practical guidance on how companies can achieve these goals. “It’s all about execution now,” she says. “We have a critical mass of companies and investors that have said they will commit to net zero, but what does that mean?”
She argues that students need courses on everything from implementing energy efficiency measures in their buildings and ensuring all vehicle fleets run on clean energy and setting an internal price on carbon. “We’re not seeing enough of that,” she says. “They haven’t gotten to the granular level of what it will take.”
Elizabeth Sturcken, CEO of the US campaign group Environmental Defense Fund, agrees. “Students need to understand how the economy needs to transform in the next 10 years at a high level, then courses that train them in specific areas,” she says. “They need to understand how to turn high-level needs into practical action.”
Mayer hopes changes can happen quickly. “Business and financial institutions are catching on to this faster than business schools,” she says. “Business schools must be at the forefront of the changes that are taking place, not behind the scenes.”
Life cycle management to reduce environmental impacts
Driven by public awareness and international norms and standards, sustainability and environmental impacts have become increasingly important distinguishing factors among competing products and services. The circular economy aims to increase economic growth by using natural resources and ecosystems in a more efficient way with the aim of keeping products, components and materials at their maximum utility and value at all times.
The more effective use of materials allows the creation of more value both through cost savings and through the development of new markets or through the development of existing ones. The reduced purchase of resources is an innovation driver for the sustainable use of materials, components and products, as well as new business models.
Methods and tools must always be used to assess and reduce environmental impacts and improve resource efficiency and sustainability management. Life cycle thinking constitutes one of the basic principles of sustainable development, and Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is the leading method for assessing the potential environmental impacts of a product, process or service throughout its life cycle. life (ISO 14040-44).
Other methods based on life cycle thinking are also introduced. LCA that focuses on the contribution of a product or service to global warming uses methods to measure the Carbon Footprint and facilitates the monitoring of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions (ISO 14067).
The water footprint is a tool that assesses the magnitude of potential water-specific environmental impacts of water use associated with a product, process, or organization. Its objective is to describe the impact of water use on humans and ecosystems due to changes in water quality and quantity (ISO 14046 Environmental management—Water footprint—Principles, requirements and guidelines 2014).
The handprint concept has been recently introduced to measure and communicate the positive changes of actions and beneficial impacts created within the life cycle of products, services, processes, companies, organizations or individuals.
A product handprint can be created by preventing or avoiding negative impacts (handprints) or by creating positive benefits. By adopting the circular economy way of thinking, companies need these tools and methods to ensure resource efficiency, cost reduction, and improvements in their environmental performance that give them more revenue opportunities. Fundamental changes along the value chain, from product design and production processes to new business models and consumption patterns, support this trend.
What are the 4 dimensions of environmental education?
Like everything in scientific research, classifications and categorizations are vital when it comes to making any analysis more understandable and useful. Therefore, regarding the categorization of the necessary dimensions to learn in environmental education, the theoretical references of the Content Analysis methodological procedure were considered, as well as the four dimensions that characterize the development of environmental awareness: active, cognitive , conative and affective.
In other words, a joint, systematic and orderly cognitive and emotional process, which gives a very eloquent panorama of the spectrum in which learning and action must move to combat climate change through good educational action.
How does education influence the environment?
Environmental education increases the awareness and knowledge of citizens about environmental issues or problems. In doing so, it provides the public with the necessary tools to make informed decisions and responsible actions.
How does environmental education influence in your immediate context to reduce environmental problems?
Environmental education should promote a change in attitudes, a responsible participation in the social management of the environment and create appropriate actions with their surroundings, in general. But conventional education has been ineffective in changing socio-environmental attitudes and behaviors.
What is environmental education and an example?
Environmental education is a multidisciplinary training aimed at making all human beings aware of the importance of respecting and preserving the environment and, also, of respecting the right to well-being of the rest of the living species with which we share the planet.
What are the environmental dimensions?
The environmental dimension consists of the harmonious development between the diversity of ecosystems, man and his environment in the same territory, in such a way that the objectives of social, economic and cultural order can be carried out, without damaging nature.
How many are the environmental dimensions?
The environmental dimension must be analyzed, in a broad sense, both in its natural aspects (soil, flora, fauna) and pollution (air, water, soil, waste), landscape value, alteration of human customs and impacts on the environment. people’s health.
What is the Environmental Dimension?
In general, it can be understood as the natural or transformed system in which humanity lives, with all its social and biophysical aspects and the relationships between them.
Environmental protection is especially demonstrated in each of the thousands of “decision-making” that affect a territory:
– Where are urbanizations, sanitary landfills, industries, etc. located and how are they operated?
– What effective measures are taken for the rehabilitation of quarries and open pit mines? These are examples of specific concerns.
This daily attitude, in small and big things, together with globally marking “environmentalism” in activities, gives rise to the concept of environmental impact.
For a long time this term was coined for pollution issues and was also focused on the urban; then it was extended to animal and plant species and natural ecosystems.
For this reason, the environmental impact and Environmental Dimension can be broadly defined as the significant alteration of natural and transformed systems and their resources, caused by human actions.
The central concern regarding an environmental impact is to establish the type of alterations that are annoying: noise and fumes in the urban area? Health problems? The greenhouse effect or the deterioration of the ozone layer?
The answers to these questions constitute the levels of environmental alteration whose significance and importance concern humanity in general and countries and human groups in particular.
In short, the concern arises with all those characteristics of the environment where the human being lives whose affectation can alter his quality of life, either directly or indirectly.