New York, NY – To equip future business leaders with the skills to lead on climate change, Columbia Business School and partner universities are launching the Open Climate Curriculum. This new initiative brings together faculty from business schools across the globe to accelerate the teaching of climate change and the integration of climate action into business education by fostering knowledge sharing, collaboration, and the development of teaching materials using generative AI.
The Open Climate Curriculum initiative provides free teaching materials from educators at Harvard Business School, the MIT Sloan School of Management, the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, NYU Stern School of Business, Duke University, and the University of California Berkeley Haas School of Business, among many others, with additional business schools to join. The site is designed for educators, to adapt materials to teach at their own universities and business schools. Educators also have access to the site’s generative AI tool to create customized climate change courses – drawing from a broad range of issue areas from ESG investing to decarbonization in emerging markets.
“Our collective response to the climate change challenge will affect every aspect of our lives, every industry, every corner of our economy. Businesses will be responsible for implementing and scaling solutions; for adapting their business models to new realities; for implementing mitigating measures to protect our cities, our food systems, our national security, our energy grids, and our transportation networks, said Columbia Business School Dean Costis Maglaras, the David and Lyn Silfen Professor of Business. “Business schools have a role to play. We educate future business leaders. We help re-skill current business leaders. To accelerate our efforts at Columbia Business School, we have committed to work collaboratively with many peer schools, globally, in curriculum development for business education in the area of climate, and to open source that curriculum with the world. This will rapidly expand our ability to innovate in our own classrooms, and dramatically increase our potential impact to the world.”
The Open Climate Curriculum initiative, based at Columbia Business School’s Tamer Center for Social Enterprise, is designed to rapidly add faculty and curriculum materials from business schools internationally. Columbia Business School also intends to enable the translation of teaching resources into multiple languages, ensuring that every business school can access and use them.
“It’s rewarding to connect with leading educators as we build a first-of-its-kind open-source database for teaching future business leaders on climate change,” said Columbia Business School Professor Bruce Usher, the Elizabeth B. Strickler '86 and Mark T. Gallogly '86 Faculty Director of the Tamer Center for Social Enterprise. “Business school educators recognize that meeting the challenge of climate change means we need to do more to equip businesses to do their part, and that we need to move fast. The Open Climate Curriculum initiative marshals the collective expertise across business schools globally to ensure faculty can adapt quickly, design their own courses, and teach business leaders to take effective climate action.”
The Open Climate Curriculum initiative is part of Columbia Business School’s deep commitment to building the capacity for businesses to address climate change. Columbia Business School’s climate curriculum has been expanding since 2004, when Professors Geoffrey Heal and Bruce Usher introduced the first classes specifically designed around business and climate. Researchers also continue to generate new insights on climate solutions, corporate climate change initiatives, prediction markets, carbon reduction pledges, consumer psychology and behavioral nudging, and clean growth and climate change.
To learn more about the Open Climate Curriculum, please visit: https://openclimatecurriculum.org.
###