Carbon Neutrality Makes the Grade

B-schools are enlisting students' help in developing their own carbon-neutral schemes, and they may develop leaders of tomorrow's sustainable economies

by Alison Damast

Thunderbird professor Greg Unruh was going through his interoffice office mail last year when a Time magazine cover with an illustration of a polar bear floating on an iceberg came across his desk. The article was a clarion call about global warming, with an alarming headline: "Be Worried, Be Very Worried."

Aside from feeling sympathy for the hapless polar bear, something else caught the business-school professor's attention. Attached to the magazine was a note from Thunderbird president Angel Cabrera that read: "Greg, not only do we need to be worried, but we need to act. What would it take to make Thunderbird carbon neutral?"

The "Carbon-Free Degree"

The note struck a chord with Unruh, the director of the school's Lincoln Center for Ethics in Global Management, who soon after launched an initiative he nicknamed the "Carbon-Free Degree." By the time students arrived on campus this fall, the school had invested $15,000 to help reforest a Costa Rican rainforest, had launched a contest asking students to come up with innovative ways to reduce the school's energy output, and had named two student government sustainability chairs.

"We really believed this was an urgent program," says Unruh, who was so excited about the program that he tried to get the school to put the term "carbon-free degree" on students' diplomas.

The school nixed that proposal. But never before has the term "carbon neutral"—the New Oxford American Dictionary's Word of the Year in 2006—been so trendy on business-school campuses. Despite some skepticism about the ultimate value of various carbon-offset schemes, "carbon neutral" is echoing all over business-school corridors, with students and faculty carefully trying to figure out ways to erase their jumbo carbon footprints, a term used to describe how much carbon dioxide a person contributes to the atmosphere through everyday activities like driving or energy use.

Wanted: Carbon Managers

Business schools in Britain, Canada, and the U.S. are taking stabs at reducing carbon, hoping to stem the tide of global warming. For example, at Toronto's Rotman School of Management, administrators are giving executive education students carbon footprint calculators this fall, hoping students will use their math skills to reduce their energy output at school and, eventually, in the workplace. Other schools have invested in the carbon offset retail market, buying credits from organizations that then use the money to fund reforestation, renewable energy, and energy-efficiency projects in other parts of the world.

Perhaps the most telling sign that the trend is here to stay is the January, 2008, launch of what's termed the world's first MBA in Carbon Management, at the University of East Anglia's Norwich Business School in England. Students in the program will take classes in environmental accounting, low-carbon business regulation, and sustainable economics, among other topics. Companies interested in recruiting students have already begun contacting the school, says Kevan Williams, the director of the program.

"They're asking us, 'Do you have any graduates yet? We need to employ somebody like that,' " Williams says. "We feel, and our recent experience has justified, that this is a subject of its time."

Indeed, savvy business-school students are not getting involved in campus carbon projects solely for altruistic reasons. They see a growing demand from businesses for MBAs with management skills in reducing carbon outputs. By midcentury, most major corporations will have to calculate their emissions baseline and come up with a strategy for reducing it, predicts Joseph Romm, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and author of the blog Climate Progress.