The Sustainability Policy and Management Research Program (SPM) provides the academic basis for the Sustainability Management (SUMA) master's program. To further the impact of SPM on the SUMA program, SPM is actively exploring different ways to engage with students, produce relevant and practical content and communicate our research effectively.
Spring 2024 SPM Taught Courses:
Taught by SPM director, Dr. Steve Cohen.
This course will begin by clearly defining what sustainability management is and determining if a sustainable economy is actually feasible. Students will learn to connect environmental protection to organizational management by exploring the technical, financial, managerial, and political challenges of effectively managing a sustainable environment and economy. This course is taught in a case-based format and will seek to help students learn the basics of management, environmental policy and sustainability economics. Sustainability management matters because we only have one planet, and we must learn how to manage our organizations in a way that ensures that the health of our planet can be maintained and bettered. This course is designed to introduce students to the field of sustainability management. It is not an academic course that reviews the literature of the field and discusses how scholars thing about the management of organizations that are environmentally sound. It is a practical course organized around the core concepts of sustainability.
Taught by Dr. Christoph Meinrenken.
Taught by Dr. Christoph Meinrenken.
Taught by Dr. Satyajit Bose.
Taught by Dr. Satyajit Bose and Dr. Dong Guo.
Taught by Dr. Dong Guo.
Taught by Dr. Anyi Wang.
Fall 2024 SPM Taught Courses:
Taught by Dr. Satyajit Bose.
The course provides an overview of the opportunities and challenges of transnational financing from public and private sources that seeks to support mitigation and adaptation investments intended to address climate change. Although there is increased and widespread commitment to taking climate action on the part of corporations, financial institutions, countries and sub-national actors, there remains a paucity of examples where a just transition has been furthered. The conditions engendered by the advent of widespread pandemics have exacerbated global differences in capacity and access to solutions. Nevertheless, the emergence of new financial mechanisms and global cooperative responses to the pandemic have revealed potential methods to finance enhancements in mitigation and adaptation in the regions where these are most lacking. We examine current capital and trade flows and their relationship to flows of embedded carbon, methods of carbon pricing and the implementation of low-carbon pathways, with an evaluation of decentralized co-benefits that can advance sustainable development. We combine analysis of carbon accounting and financial structuring to design potential investments in example decarbonization projects which integrate additionality in mitigation and adaptation, co-benefits and poverty alleviation.
Taught by SPM director, Dr. Steve Cohen.
This course will begin by clearly defining what sustainability management is and determining if a sustainable economy is actually feasible. Students will learn to connect environmental protection to organizational management by exploring the technical, financial, managerial, and political challenges of effectively managing a sustainable environment and economy. This course is taught in a case-based format and will seek to help students learn the basics of management, environmental policy and sustainability economics. Sustainability management matters because we only have one planet, and we must learn how to manage our organizations in a way that ensures that the health of our planet can be maintained and bettered. This course is designed to introduce students to the field of sustainability management. It is not an academic course that reviews the literature of the field and discusses how scholars thing about the management of organizations that are environmentally sound. It is a practical course organized around the core concepts of sustainability.
Get more information on the course here.
Taught by Dr. Dong Guo.
The urgency to tackle sustainability-related global problems has revealed the growing need to create, maintain and analyze data on environmental and social issues with robust methodologies. The availability of nascent sustainability datasets and advanced data tools such as GIS, machine learning, and blockchain has expanded our capabilities for quick and agile decision-making in the sustainability space. However, compared to real-time economic data, timely and reliable environmental and social data are very much lacking. Sustainability indicators are able to transform a vast amount of information about our complex environment into concise, policy-applicable and manageable information. There is a very large universe of indicators to measure the sustainability performance of an entity, but the critical question is what to use and how many indicators should be evaluated. Sustainability indicators are either presented in a structured framework that can be used to isolate and report on relevant indicators, or aggregated towards a composite index or score/rating. The number of indicators used for assessing sustainability have proliferated, with hundreds of sustainability related indices around the world, including the Ecological Footprint, the Human Development Index, green accounting, Sustainable Development Goals, the Environmental Performance Index (EPI) co-developed by Columbia University and Yale University, the Urban Sustainability Ranking System that I helped develop, and various carbon indices.
Taught by Louise Rosen, Maya Lugo and Tal Henig-Hadar.
This course provides students with an overview of environmental research, covering the conceptualization of research projects, the grantmaking process, and article writing. Throughout the semester, students will attend lectures from Columbia researchers and professionals from other organizations. These lectures will cover their current projects and how they communicate their findings in various settings, communities, cultures, and industries. The lecturers will also discuss different aspects of the research process and the practicalities of project development. Students will learn the basics of grant writing and research methodology, write an academic research paper, and participate in a colloquium, with the aim of providing them with tangible transferable skills.
Taught by Dr. Christoph Meinrenken.
Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), a methodology to assess the environmental impact of products, services, and industrial processes is an increasingly important tool in corporate sustainability management. This course teaches both the theoretical framework as well as step-by-step practical guidelines of conducting LCAs in companies and organizations. Particular emphasis is placed on separating the more academic, but less practically relevant aspects of LCA (which will receive less focus) from the actual practical challenges of LCA (which will be covered in detail, including case studies). The course also covers the application of LCA metrics in a companies’ management and discusses the methodological weaknesses that make such application difficult, including how these can be overcome. Product carbon footprinting (as one form of LCA) receives particular focus, owing to its widespread practical use in recent and future sustainability management.