Climate Change business courses - why so few?
Imperial College's MSc Climate Change, Management & Finance is a proven success. So why is it not being replicated elsewhere?
The Green Edge had an illuminating conversation recently with Professor Martin Siegert, co-director of the Grantham Institute for Climate Change and Environment at Imperial College, London. We were very interested to hear from Martin about the MSc Climate Change, Management & Finance programme operated by the Imperial College Business School in partnership with the Grantham Institute. Now into its sixth cohort, student numbers on the programme have increased year on year, from 45 in 2015/16 to 95 this year. It is over-subscribed tenfold and has the highest employability rate - 95% three months after graduation - of all the Imperial College Business School programmes.
The key question, given the success of this programme and the importance of the climate economy, is why have so many other business schools not followed suit with similar programmes? We discuss this with Martin in the full article, which you can find, together with a video of the conversation, by subscribing to the Green Edge newsletter.
One thing we found ourselves thinking about from our conversation with Martin is how a dedicated climate business school might look. While individual business schools like Imperial will always hold a dominant and respected place in this field, we suspect the sheer scale of numbers of qualified people needed for the Net Zero business effort would max out any business school very quickly. Perhaps if someone like Alok Sharma were to trigger an imagining of a cross-institution Climate and Environment Business School – perhaps drawing on the collaboration being realised through the UK COP 26 Universities Network[1] as a starting point – then he may find many people very quickly become interested in that conversation.