Climate Change in Business School Curricula

The current decade is considered a make-or-break decade for climate action. Business school curricula must adapt to the significant challenge of climate change risks and their effects on businesses. After a brief background on climate change, its origins, and its wide-ranging effects, we discuss major international policy initiatives. This leads to understanding how climate change shapes today’s business environment through mitigation, adaptation, and transition demands and allows us to focus on what business schools should teach future industry leaders. We suggest that a module on the science of climate change and its effects on the environment and economic activity should be followed by a discussion of international agreements to combat climate change and then a discussion of national emissions targets, carbon taxes, emissions markets, and climate finance as critical new elements of the business landscape that business students must be well versed in. We discuss the modules for a broad curriculum on climate for business education, give more details on a potential course on climate finance that we have been teaching, and conclude with a short case study.