More schools focusing on sustainability

The industrial revolution had many impacts on our planet, two unforeseeable: Environmental havoc and, in turn, an admission that something must be done to alter this destructive path.

Everyone from marketing to manufacturing has taken up the ecosystem’s cause, with two fiscally oriented fields in particular — business administration and post-secondary institutions — recognizing their part in social responsibility. Working together, they have updated the MBA through a fresh choice in distinction: Sustainability — a.k.a. the “Green” MBA.

Traditionally, an MBA focuses on a financial standpoint: Management, conventional economic theory and business ethics. However, as the reality of maintaining global finance is increasingly impacted by environmental concerns, business has acknowledged its accountability in maintaining current practice while ensuring future revenues. It must maximize profit while affecting Mother Nature minimally. In essence, business needs a balance of understanding economy and ecology; the Triple Bottom Line referred to insiders as People, Profit and Planet. Enter MBA graduates with a mind for the landscape.

In that respect, many Canadian universities now offer sustainability/social responsibility as an addendum to their continuing MBA programs. A curriculum that broadens respected business models to include three new criteria — economic (the financial implication of depleting natural resources); environmental (loss of commercial flora or faunae; global warming); and social (increasing population overtaxing the planet).

Completion of the green MBA is generally within the original course’s duration of approximately four-and-a-half years from bachelor’s degree to master’s. Sixteen of those months focus more intensely on global impact, and the result is an MBA with accompanying diplomas characterizing attention to sustainability.

Growing in popularity, Green MBAs abound across Canada. Virtually every post-secondary institution offers a direct program or variation, creating a swath of carbon-offsetting footprints across the Great White North. The likes of Sauder (University of B.C.), University of Alberta and Manitoba, Richard Ivey (Western), Laurentian, McGill and more boast such programs, while York’s Schulich School Of Business was deemed Top Global Green MBA school by non-profit humanities organization The Aspen Group (TAG) for 2009-2010. It beat out competitors such as Yale and Notre Dame thanks to what TAG identified in their latest report as an “extraordinary number of courses available to students that contain environmental, social and ethical content” and many “relevant scholarly articles ... published by the school’s faculty members.”

To that extent, distinction is crucial in garnering fresh enrolment to green MBAs. Halifax’s Dalhousie boasts an MBA in natural resources, whereas the University of Victoria has embedded sustainability directly into all MBA and bachelor Of commerce degrees. Summarizing University Of Ottawa Professor David Wright, Telfer School of Management yields a green MBA that “directly addresses the business impact of (climate change), corporate social responsibility (and) ... identifying the business opportunities that arise from climate change.”

It would seem commerce and universities are interested in a different sort of “green” these days.