Note: This Climate Site offers you a detailed overview of Your Climate Change MBA. While the Climate Web is open-access, so much information is organized there that it might take you a while to find the specific “actionable knowledge” you’re looking for to support business decision-making. Your Climate Change MBA gives you instant access to much of that knowledge, saving you literally hundreds of hours. Explore the different chapters of Your Climate Change MBA through the tab listed at right. For a temporary password to expore the complete knowledgebase, or to purchase full access, visit the “Test or Purchase” tab in the list at right.
Thirty years ago, a few companies started measuring their greenhouse gas (GHG) footprints, experimenting with the carbon offsets, and making the first corporate emissions reduction commitments. The Climatographers, the first business-risk focused climate change advisory firm in the U.S., assisted many of them.
Corporate climate responses have come a long way since then; climate change is no longer just a chapter in corporate social responsibility reports. GHG footprints are everywhere, even extending to Scope 3. Emissions reduction commitments are “going big” with science-based, net-zero, and even carbon-negative targets.
Nevertheless, the business risks posed by climate change have grown in magnitude and in number.
Until just five years ago, companies were being told that material physical impacts of climate change were still decades away.
Five years ago there was almost no discussion of systemic climate risk, which is now commonly characterized as the risk elephant in the room.
Corporate initiatives and strategies that stakeholders once applauded may now be labeled as “greenwishing” or even “greenwashing.”
Brand risk, market transition risk, and even liability risk are all growing parts of the business risk picture (as readily illustrated by several recent court rulings).
Complicating business decision-making even further are calls for business to lead the charge on tackling climate change, in effect substituting for national and international policies.
Ten years ago, when Simon Dietz of the London School of Economics was preparing to teach a climate change course for business executives, he could not find a textbook for the course. The Climatographers were asked to write that textbook, which was then published in 2012 under the title The Changing Profile of Corporate Climate Change Risk. It was followed in 2013 by Adapting to Climate Change– 2.0 Enterprise Risk Management.
Today, far more business decision-makers need far more actionable climate knowledge than they ever have needed before. Their business materiality environment (representing both climate risks and opportunities) is changing rapidly. Books can no longer be fast enough to response, comprehensive enough, or remain current long enough, to successfully deliver the actionable knowledge needed by all kinds of companies across numerous sectors.
That’s why, soon after publishing The Changing Profile of Corporate Climate Change Risk in 2012, the Climatographers started building the Climate Web to support robust business climate change decision-making. Today the Climate Web is the closest thing to a collective business climate change intelligence, supporting materiality assessments, assumptions audits, scenario planning, and more.
Your Climate Change MBA leverages the 20,000 hours of business knowledge curated in the Climate Web. From the knowns and unknowns of climate change, and the business implications of numerous categories of climate risk, to the options companies have from carbon offsets to scenario planning, Your Climate Change MBA helps you access the climate-relevant knowledge you need at any given time. While Your Climate Change MBA does not result in a professional certification, it incorporates the materials used by the Climatographers’ Dr. Mark Trexler in teaching Business Climate Change Mitigation at George Washington University.
Your Climate Change MBA pulls together a great deal of topical information and insight, while also pointing you to a large number of curated “topical dashboards” in the Climate Web. Each of those “dashboards” can save you anywhere from a few hours to weeks of research. Note that taking advantage of the ability to download the Climate Web through Premium Access makes it much faster and easier to explore (more on that later).
Note: Due to the nature of its objectives and its content, Your Climate Change MBA will always be a work in progress. We welcome your suggestions for new content and modifications that would make Your Climate Change MBA more useful to you as a source of actionable business knowledge. Please contact the Climatographers at info@climatographer.com or at 503-913-0025.
Note: You may have seen reference to the Climatographers’ Your Climate Change PhD. While there is some topical overlap between the two products, Your Climate Change PhD digs more deeply into topics including climate change as a wicked problem, the psychology of climate change, the communication of climate change, individual action on climate change, denial of climate change, and Climate Chess, among others, than does Your Climate Change MBA which focuses on the needs of business decision-making.