Regulation, financial pressure, politics and time have worked to evolve the field of business and sustainability over the last 30+ years. Whereas in previous decades, sustainability practitioners would establish the business case for addressing social and environmental risks and opportunities based on theory and generalized approaches to risk analysis, today money for sustainable assets is measured against the same criteria as any other investment. Moreover, management of assets to create positive environmental and social outcomes now entails the same controls and risk mitigation strategies that business uses to manage financial outcomes.

However, there are key differences in the information that we use to price and manage assets for sustainability compared to pure financial outcomes. Applying the techniques used to price and manage financial performance into the sustainability world also requires more expansive understanding of integrated risk.

This class attempts to build on the fundamentals of finance and management and apply them to business risks where we must optimize against both financial outcomes and social/environmental outcomes. The first half of the course dives into the financial risks associated with environmental and social challenges to business and then model the price of an asset based on the accrual of that monetized risk to the asset. We will approach pricing from the perspective of different investor types culminating in an investment memo for a hypothetical Investment Committee.

In the second half of the class, we will turn our attention to the management of environmental and social risk to protect the financial performance of an existing asset. Our focus will be on large corporations and the systems they use today to understand, measure, control and audit for social and environmental risks. This half of the class will culminate in a Memo to a Corporate Executive Team on the most appropriate sustainability strategy implementation.

This class is intended to be highly practical to anyone interested in either sustainable finance or corporate sustainability by providing building on the core concepts of business and sustainability and then building the tools used by investors and companies to price and manage environmental and social risks in the context of protecting financial value.

Course Date & Time

TBD