Sustainability Consulting

Overview

Sustainability Consulting will look at the techniques and careers of people who aid individuals, companies, governments, and other organizations in their efforts to pursue sustainability goals. Students will learn core concepts and tools sustainability consultants use (including Life Cycle Analysis). The course will also critically examine common sustainability consultant practices, including ESG, footprinting, and the role of LEED and other sustainability standards.

Syllabus

Course Orientation

You will become familiar with the course, your classmates, and our learning environment. The orientation will also help you obtain the technical skills required for the course.

Module 1: Introduction

This week we’ll be introducing the field of sustainability consulting and the key idea of life cycle thinking. A sustainability consultant works with organizations to help them improve their sustainability performance, or to certify that performance. This might mean making sustainability assessments –strategic planning, implementation of sustainability programs, or reporting on sustainability performance. These workers make these judgments using life cycle analysis to make quantitative, replicable determinations of environmental impact. All sustainability consultants either explicitly or implicitly use this technique in their work, and we’ll start the course by learning about this approach.

Module 2: Life-Cycle Assessment

This week we will be continuing our discussion of life-cycle assessment. This will enable us to see how consultants interpret LCA results: by identifying the significant inventory and impact results, evaluating the reliability and conditions of those results, and finally by stating their conclusions and recommendations. We’ll also begin to look at case studies - starting with Christmas trees!

Module 3: Social Sustainability

Environmental, social, and governance (ESG) refers to a set of criteria used to assess the sustainability and ethical impact of investments or business practices. ESG has become an increasingly important concept in recent years as more regulators, investors and customers have become more concerned about measuring the wider impacts of corporations. But the way ESG is rated is not without controversy - and nor are the ways in which companies improve their ESG scores. This week we will apply our life cycle thinking to understand what lots of consultants do, and why it might not always be making the world more sustainable.

Module 4: Certifying Sustainability

For many companies, sustainability certifications are a large part of the value in hiring the services of sustainability consultants. They provide a mark of approval that can help them send the right message to their various stakeholders - be they customers, employees, regulators, or even their peers. These certifications possibly even make the world more sustainable. Good consultants rigorously assess the companies they work with, and as we’ll see this week, their is a wide variety of settings in which these assessments take place. Sometimes sustainability workers even help companies from within.