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Discover climate course materials and resources.
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- Course
The climate tech sector includes climate change solutions such as renewable energy, batteries, electric vehicles, carbon capture, hydrogen, food tech, smart agriculture, green real estate, and advanced materials. These sectors represent considerable growth opportunities in the coming decades, which means job opportunities and meaningful career paths for students. For example, Bloomberg projects that $10 trillion will be invested in solar, wind and batteries by 2050.
Through “in the trenches” input from guest speakers (founders and investors across the US) and practice-oriented assignments, students will become more fluent with certain skills and tools, such as the following: (1) sizing markets, (2) doing competitor analysis, (3) preparing to raise investor capital, (5) using investor databases, and (5) negotiating term sheets.
- Topics on: Climate Finance, Climate Tech, Social Impact and Sustainability
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The course concentrates in four thematic fields: Ecosystem Services, Economic Valuation, Climate Change and Water. These topics will be assessed within a business context.
- Topics on: Climate Finance, Climate Sustainability, Operations
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This course is about the economics of energy and environmental markets. Topics include the drivers of supply and demand, organized spot and futures markets, market power and regulation, energy transportation and storage, environmental policy, climate change, innovation, and the energy transition.
- Topics on: Climate Finance, Climate Sustainability, Renewable Energy
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- Topics on: Climate Finance, Climate Sustainability, Social Impact and Sustainability
- Course
Plants are at the intersection of at least a dozen problems and opportunities in our food system: climate change, personal, public and planetary health, nutrition insecurity, biodiversity, social justice, food access, diversity and inclusion, soil health, law and policy, technology, animal welfare, and antibiotic resistance. Build critical systems thinking competencies at the intersection of agriculture, nutrition, climate science, behavioral science, economics, entrepreneurship and ethics with plant-centric food systems.
- Topics on: Climate Justice, Climate Sustainability, Social Impact and Sustainability
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This is a course provided by Berkeley Haas on Carbon Footprint Analysis for Innovation. The course is 1 credit for an MBA course degree program. The course code is EWMBA292T.14/MBA292T.1.
- Topics on: Climate Sustainability, Climate Tech, Corporate Sustainability Strategy
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This course is intended for students with an interest in how climate change is impacting business, and how business sustainability depends both on mitigating climate impacts and on adaptation to ongoing climate change.
- Topics on: Climate Sustainability, Climate Tech, Decarbonization
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The course will offer analytical tools and concepts to analyze the strategic environment for climate innovation and apply these to a variety of cases. A climate innovation here refers to a low-carbon/net-negative technology and/or business model.
- Topics on: Climate Sustainability, Renewable Energy, Social Impact and Sustainability
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The key responsibilities of those managing the Haas Sustainable Investment Fund, include: b. establishing priority sustainability issue areas, investment vehicles, and selection criteria, these could be related to specific sustainability issue areas such as Climate or Human Rights or to particular investment vehicles such as public or private equity
- Topics on: Climate Investing, Climate Sustainability, Corporate Sustainability Strategy
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Impact Investing, in the broad sense used in this class, is a discipline which seeks to generate social benefits as well as financial returns. From boutique beginnings, Impact Investing has surged into the mainstream of global money management, now affecting trillions of dollars of assets. The greatest demand is for strategies and products that promote social good while having expected returns competitive with non-impact options, although many other approaches exist.
Impact Investing and the associated ESG investing paradigm also permeate the agendas of policymakers, asset owners including pension plans and sovereign wealth funds, wealthy and retail investors, corporate managers, academia, and philanthropic foundations. A distinct career specialization for finance professionals has emerged, and the diversity of its applications is spreading the new discipline’s influence throughout world markets.
- Topics on: Climate Sustainability, ESG, Social Impact and Sustainability
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The objective of this course is to provide students with detailed knowledge of corporate structures, valuation methods, project finance, risk management practices, corporate governance issues, and geo-political and technological risks in the energy industry. In general, this course seeks to provide students with an overall context for understanding energy issues and risks, and how these might affect financing and investment decisions for both providers of energy and end-users of energy.
- Topics on: Climate Finance, ESG
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Water is the lifeblood of business. Virtually every business imaginable — everything from oil refining to semiconductor manufacturing to cloud computing — requires copious supplies of fresh water. However, there is a fixed amount of water on earth, and in any given place, the supply, demand, and quality of freshwater can change. As climate change makes many parts of the world hotter and drier, it is increasingly important for today’s business leaders to be able to understand water challenges and to implement solutions that will enable businesses to thrive in the future. In addition to understanding and navigating water quality and quantity challenges, business leaders must operate in a highly regulated environment.
Water is regulated at the multinational, national, regional, state and local levels, and it’s important to understand who the key external stakeholders are and how to engage with them in productive ways. THE BUSINESS AND GOVERNANCE OF WATER – THE WHARTON SCHOOL 2 Finally, future business leaders should learn about the growth opportunities in the global water sector. Water is an $800 billion global industry whose value chain includes operating water utilities, engineering firms, technology companies, and financial services firms.
- Topics on: Climate Justice, Climate Sustainability, Corporate Sustainability Strategy
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It was not long ago when business looked at environmental issues and their impact as a compliance exercise. Slowly, at first, leading businesses began to change their concept of environmental management to look beyond simply meeting governmental dictates. These organizations began to evolve and utilize “sustainability strategies” to create new ways to drive value creation by bringing sustainability to the core of their business strategy. This seismic shift was accompanied by a bottomline emphasis that, in some cases, turned sustainability efforts into profit centers. Today, there has been a shift, yet again, to confront what the reality that business must lead our world’s response to climate change and to help avoid disaster.
Businesses must be prepared for climate change’s impacts on their operations and must be fully positioned to drive value creation and innovation in these challenging times. Business cannot simply react to environmental mandates; they must lead and drive change! 2 Sustainable initiatives are increasingly not hidden within the silos of sustainability, EHS (environmental, health, and safety), or CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) departments, but have become much more seamlessly integrated into the operations of enterprise functional disciplines. Today, to effectively work in senior management, an executive needs to be knowledgeable not only about their specific business function, but also on how their business will be impacted by environmental supply chain disruptions, requirements around sustainability reporting, ESG (environmental, social, and governance) demands on a business, ability to market sustainable product attributes, managing energy, water, and food needs globally, and sustainable technology to drive new initiatives
- Topics on: Climate Sustainability
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- Topics on: Climate Sustainability, Corporate Sustainability Strategy, ESG
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The world is engaged in a transition to clean and sustainable (“green”) energy. The ensuing disruption creates opportunities for innovation on many fronts, including new social arrangements, new business models, and entrepreneurial activities of many kinds. OIDD 5250 is a business analytics 1 class that addresses these matters by surveying and introducing the main kinds of models and modeling techniques being used in the green transition.
These include: (non-financial) accounting models (e.g., for calculating carbon footprints, for ESG investing, for life-cycle analysis), constrained optimization models (resource allocation using mathematical programming or AI methods in the form of metaheuristics), and system performance models (typically as simulations and often using AI methods such as agent-based modeling). There will be special emphasis on decision theoretic models and multi-criteria decision making (MCDM). These models are used to support decision making based on data and model outputs from multiple sources and domains. The problem of overcoming low data quality with proper use of modeling is a major theme in the course.
- Topics on: Operations, Renewable Energy
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This course focuses on the social and environmental responsibilities of business that may extend beyond profit maximization. In 2019, the Business Roundtable composed of leading chief executive officers of U.S.-based companies released a statement that resurrected and reinforced interest in this view. (See reading link for Class 2 below under Course Outline.)
This view contrasts with a traditional approach famously expressed by the economist Milton Friedman that “the social responsibility of business is to increase its profits.” Although Friedman acknowledged normative side constraints to the profit motive—namely, a need to conform to the “basic rules of the society, both those embodied in law and those embodied in ethical custom”—he did not see business itself as playing a central role in the creation and sustenance of these “basic rules.”
The profit-maximizing view of business purpose is the one most frequently modeled in business school classes. This course presents students with the opportunity to explore an alternative perspective: that business owes a “social responsibility” that includes, but goes beyond, profits.
- Topics on: Climate Sustainability, Corporate Sustainability Strategy
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The law and public policy shape the relationships between business firms and the environment, including the climate. The first part of the course will provide a grounding in the foundational concepts of environmental law and policy. As we address different topics in environmental law and policy, we will examine a series of case studies in which law, policy and business intersect.
Examples include how informational regulation affects business strategy regarding climate change and how the law of municipal and hazardous waste management informs business practices about waste. We will also examine the emerging concept of private environmental governance. We will then focus on different approaches of incorporating environmental and climate strategy into business practices. The final part of the course will consist of student group presentations.
- Topics on: Climate Policy, Climate Sustainability
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Over the last several decades, energy markets have become some of the most dynamic markets of the world economy. Traditional fossil fuel and electricity markets have seen a partial shift from heavy regulation to market-driven incentives, while rising environmental concerns have led to a wide array of new regulations and “environmental markets”. The growth of renewable energy is another source of rapid change, but brings with it a whole new set of technological and policy challenges.
This changing energy landscape requires quick adaptation from energy companies, but also offers opportunities to turn regulations into new business. The objective of this course is to provide the economist’s perspective on a broad range of topics that professionals in the energy industry will encounter. Topics include the effect of competition, market power and scarcity on energy prices, extraction and pricing of oil and gas, geopolitical uncertainty and risk in hydrocarbon investments, the environmental policies related to the energy sector and their effectiveness, cap-and-trade markets, and transportation policies. There is special emphasis on the economics and finance of renewable energy, including an introduction to energy storage.
- Topics on: Climate Policy, Renewable Energy
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Over the last several decades, energy markets have become some of the most dynamic markets of the world economy. Traditional fossil fuel and electricity markets have seen a partial shift from heavy regulation to market-driven incentives, while rising environmental concerns have led to a wide array of new regulations and “environmental markets”. The growth of renewable energy is another source of rapid change, but brings with it a whole new set of technological and policy challenges. This changing energy landscape requires quick adaptation from energy companies, but also offers opportunities to turn regulations into new business.
The objective of this course is to provide the economist’s perspective on a broad range of topics that professionals in the energy industry will encounter. Topics include the effect of competition, market power and scarcity on energy prices, extraction and pricing of oil and gas, geopolitical uncertainty and risk in hydrocarbon investments, the environmental policies related to the energy sector and their effectiveness, and cap-and-trade markets. There is special emphasis on the economics and finance of renewable energy, including an introduction to energy storage.
- Topics on: Climate Finance, Climate Sustainability
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Climate change might be the defining challenge of our times, with a wide range of effects on financial markets and the broader economy. At the same time, financial markets play an important role in financing the transition to a net-zero economy. This role, however, is shaped by the information that is available to market participants. In this course, we examine how climate risks—both physical and regulatory—affect firms, financial markets (including equity, bond, and carbon markets), and markets for energy and real estate.
We examine the role that firms’ disclosures and third-party information sources play. As climate change is high on the agenda of almost every company and government, this course will be valuable both for students with the ambition to pursue a career centered around sustainability and those who want to gain a better understanding of how climate issues affect more traditional roles in the financial sector, consulting, or non-profits.
- Topics on: Climate Sustainability, Sustainability Reporting and Measurement