It is May on the Columbia campus, and despite the drumroll of attacks from the nation’s capital, here on campus the semester is wrapping up with graduation bleachers constructed on the quad and students in robes posing for photos. Despite the political noise, commencement season approaches, and students are throwing frisbees on the lawns and enjoying spring in full bloom. Over the last few weeks, I have had the honor of attending capstone project briefings in the two master’s programs that I lead. First up were the presentations by students graduating from the MPA in Environmental Science and Policy. This is a year-long intensive public policy program offered at our School of International and Public Affairs. In the summer, the students focus on environmental science, and during the next two semesters, they learn about sustainability management, financial management, public policy, quantitative analysis, and environmental economics. The five final briefings were succinct, professionally presented, and stunning. While our public policy graduates will not be heading to Washington D.C. this year, they will be working in NGOs, in the private sector, in state and local governments, and in national governments in foreign capitals. Next, I attended the final briefings for our MS in Sustainability Management students. Even though this is a management degree oriented towards the private sector, all of our capstone project clients are either governments or non-profits. Our goal here is to establish a pro-bono tradition of public service, like the one we see in the legal profession. Just as lawyers donate their expertise to indigent clients, sustainability professionals conduct management and policy analyses for clients who lack the resources to do these studies. Columbia’s Sustainability Management master’s program is quite flexible, with only two required courses; the remaining requirements are across five fields and can be fulfilled by scores of innovative courses. A unique element of this degree is that it requires three courses in “the physical dimensions of sustainability.” These can be courses in climate or environmental science, ecology, energy efficiency, greenhouse gas measurement and modeling, biodiversity, energy efficiency, renewable energy, the green built environment, sustainable fashion, sustainable agriculture, and a range of related courses. The Sustainability Management program enrolls nearly 500 students, and nearly 100 of them comprised the groups that delivered capstone presentations last week. They were joined by our colleagues in the Sustainability Science program. As expected, these presentations were professionally presented and were wonderful examples of the high-quality analytic and team processes characteristic of our mission-driven graduate students. “Net Impact is a community of more than 100,000 students and professionals with a mission to inspire, educate, and equip individuals to use the power of business to create a more socially and environmentally sustainable world. We provide a network and resources to inspire emerging leaders to build successful “impact careers” either by working in jobs dedicated to change or by bringing a social and environmental lens to traditional business roles. SUMANI fosters top-tier consultants that lead change in sustainability and transform organizations into socio-environmental stewards. We do this by providing hands-on work experience that allows our members to tackle real sustainability issues faced by organizations in various sectors, from fashion to finance.” While we do not want to ask our students to pay course tuition to conduct projects for private firms who would make money from their labor, these students eagerly undertake projects for private firms without compensation and for which they do not receive academic credit. The work is all voluntary and completed by our already busy graduate students. Not only that, but unlike the capstone course, they do this work without the guidance of faculty. The quality and amount of the work I saw was quite impressive. Perhaps we on the faculty are not as important as we thought, if these student-led projects were so terrific… On the other hand, the projects clearly benefited from the sustainability management program’s incredibly rich set of course offerings. The briefings I saw reflected lessons on life cycle assessments and sustainability finance that we teach in our graduate program. The courses we offer this spring that are now wrapping up can be seen here , and those being offered in the fall can be seen here . As the sustainability management program has evolved, we have added a number of skill-building courses such as greenhouse gas measurement, corporate sustainability reporting, sustainability finance, financing the green energy economy, the circular economy, life cycle assessment, sustainability metrics, sustainable operations, and scores of others. These courses continue to evolve as our field evolves. Conditions in the world’s economy, regulatory environment, technology, culture, and ecosystems are rapidly changing. A technology like artificial intelligence provides us with the ability to project and mitigate environmental damage, and its use is still in its infancy. Our graduates need to understand these emerging technologies and their impacts. While I am certain our students utilized what they learned in class for all these client-based projects, the projects reflected more than skills and knowledge. They were evidence of the enthusiasm, brain-power, and sheer dedication of our students. It was simply thrilling to watch. The projects address cutting-edge problems and provide practical and analytically sophisticated responses to the issues being raised. The work undertaken by all the students in all of the capstone project teams can be seen on the program websites. For the MPA in Environmental Science and Policy program, we have project archives dating back over twenty years, which can be found here and here . For the Sustainability Management program, the projects date back to 2011 and can be found here . The range of issues and clients is impressive, as is the pioneering nature of the work. Since we were able to take on projects that did not require grant funding, only our own sweat equity, our projects could take on emerging issues and often did. The evolution of project topics throughout the 21st century helps us understand the underlying forces that continue to build the profession of environmental sustainability management and policy. The graduates of these programs are in demand because the problems they have learned how to address are not going away. The planet is getting hotter, and the impact of extreme weather events is growing. Our oceans are repositories of plastics and waste. Our ecosystems are under assault, and toxics are out of control. Despite our wealth, children throughout the world go without food and hope. Science and experts are discredited and ignored. These problems are real, objective conditions. They cannot be wished away by ideology. But the problems can be addressed. We can and must do better. Just as modern management, economics, and technology enhanced the quality of life for billions in the 20th century, human ingenuity, properly focused, can address the crisis of global sustainability that has emerged in the 21st century. The world’s best-managed and most successful organizations are paying more attention to their human resources and to their impact on their community, nation, and planet. This more mindful management, sustainability management, has been adopted by most private sector corporations. Publicly traded companies are asked by their investors to measure and manage their environmental risk. Many of the people engaged in that work have had to learn it on the job. The graduates of the master’s programs I work in have completed courses that help them build the skills needed by these organizations. The capstones I attended over the past several weeks provide solid evidence of our graduates’ ability to serve as sustainability problem solvers. Views and opinions expressed here are those of the authors, and do not necessarily reflect the official position of Columbia School of Professional Studies or Columbia University. The Columbia University M.S. in Sustainability Management program offered by the School of Professional Studies in partnership with the Climate School provides students cutting-edge policy and management tools they can use to help public and private organizations and governments address environmental impacts and risks, pollution control, and remediation to achieve sustainability. The program is customized for working professionals and is offered as both a full- and part-time course of study.
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