Students arriving at Thunderbird School of Global Management in September will be embarking on a new kind of MBA degree – a carbon-free one. The idea is that by cutting the carbon footprint of the campus and offsetting outstanding emissions through credits from reforestation projects, the school can not only mitigate its contribution to climate change, but can also teach sustainability issues in a compelling way.
When it comes to the task of cutting their campus emissions, some schools are deploying innovative technical solutions. Switzerland’s IMD is installing a system that will use water from Lake Geneva to cool the school’s buildings.
“We are lucky to have a lake nearby,” says Els van Weering, the school’s director of communications. “Lake Geneva is a very deep and cold lake and this water has a constant temperature of about seven degrees centigrade. So the new system will help us cool the whole campus without using fossil fuel.”
For those not living next to a lake, however, other measures need to be implemented when it comes to heating and cooling systems. And as schools renovate or replace buildings, many are designing them so that they meet standards such as the US Green Building Council’s LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) certification or a similar UK standard, the BRE Trust’s Environmental Assessment Method (BREEAM).
Standards such as LEED cover things such as installing energy-efficient lighting, heating and cooling systems, lowering water consumption and waste management for recycling.
At California’s UC Davis, for example, the new $34.5m building for the university’s Graduate School of Management is being designed to meet the Gold LEED standard.
At the same time, schools are coming up with some innovative ideas to promote their energy saving efforts. At MIT Sloan School of Business, which is constructing a new green building on its campus, one idea proposed by Jason Roeder, an MBA student, is to install a kiosk in a public area to display the amount of electricity being used by the building, spurring those working in it to save more energy.
“It would signal the importance of these issues as well as provide real-time feedback on how we’re doing,” says John Sterman, a professor who heads the school’s green campus initiative. “And studies show that when you provide real-time feedback on how much electricity you’re using, it makes a difference.”
At Thunderbird, whose campus was originally a wartime airbase, a restoration project for the Tower Building (the former control tower) aims to turn the structure into a Platinum LEED-rated building in which a “Zero Capital Solar Pub” – the result of a student competition – will have enough solar panels installed to generate enough energy to offset the electricity the pub uses.
Less glamorous but equally important, say those behind the campus greening initiatives, is changing people’s habits, whether that is encouraging the use of double-sided photocopying, turning off computers at night or separating waste for recycling.
“Those are less sexy but they add up very quickly,” says Gregory Unruh, director of the Lincoln Centre for Ethics in Global Management at Thunderbird. “So we’re blending the high-profile project that will draw a lot of attention with more mundane operational changes.”
While these sorts of infrastructural and operational initiatives differ little from what many businesses, from banks to law firms, are doing to reduce their carbon emissions, for the schools, campus greening projects serve another important purpose – an educational one.
At Thunderbird, for example, a study to assess the carbon footprint of the campus was conducted by students working within the context of a business intelligence course.
“We did the internal auditing and measurements to understand where our carbon emissions came from,” says Prof Unruh. “And the point of all these activities was that they had to be educational as well.”
MIT Sloan is also tapping into the education value of its campus greening efforts.
At an elective taught through its Laboratory for Sustainable Business, or S-Lab, students worked in teams on live issues linked to sustainability.
