Inhalt
Sustainability management is a multi-faceted concept that encompasses many topics and issues. These range from climate change to the fight against poverty.
The purpose of this lecture is to gain a deeper understanding of such critical issues in sustainability management. To this end, the lecture does not only shed light on selected sustainability trends and the background of these challenges. More importantly, the course also aims at a systematic understanding of relevant management tools and novel instruments across all corporate functions to cope with these sustainability issues.
The three sustainability issues addressed in this class will be climate change, resource scarcity, as well as poverty and underdevelopment.
For each of these issues, we will first engage with background details, their positive and negative consequences, and their potential challenges and opportunities for businesses. Following, we will address broader concepts in sustainability management that aim at addressing the sustainability issue. In a third step, we will then introduce concrete tools and instruments that is how-to knowledge for implementation.
To illustrate, in the case of climate change, we look at the science, politics, economics, and effects on companies. We then look at concepts such as putting a price on carbon or decarbonizing value creation. Regarding management instruments, tools such as carbon accounting, carbon compensation, and carbon efficiency measures will be discussed. Best-practice and worst practices serve to illustrate the practical implementation of these instruments.