Trinity Business School

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Ireland

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BUU22592 – Managing Climate Change

(5 ECTS)

Lecturer: 

Iseult Sheehy 

Email: sheehyi@tcd.ie 
Office Hours: Thursday 11-12, Room 203 

Module Description:

This course is designed for students who want to think deeply and creatively about the biggest threats in the history of humanity. Climate change and biodiversity loss alter not just planetary systems, but all our assumptions about management and organisation. Students will be introduced to climate & biodiversity science literacy, then examine assumptions that are built deeply into business philosophy, such as value, growth, competition, efficiency, production, consumption. We will then evolve concepts that deconstruct these assumptions: de-growth, anthropocene time, Indigenous cyclical modelling, emergent strategy, political ecology, Doughnut Economics, and natural capital accounting, to name a few. These concepts stretch the span of many disciplines: economics, engineering, psychology, planning, policy studies and marketing. Equipped with the conceptual vocabulary and analytical processes for diagnosing the threats of climate change and biodiversity loss from individual, firm-level and systems-level perspectives, the course will creatively trial visions of alternative organisational futures.

Learning Outcomes:

  1. Recognize and explain the importance of the natural environment to management and organizational thought; 
  2. Communicate with climate literacy – to speak in sophisticated scientific, economic, social and psychological ways about climate change; 
  3. Develop the conceptual and methodological tools needed to analyze the interacting systems of nature, organization, economy, public policy, and technology; 
  4. To use a climate lens to critique foundational assumptions in management strategy, marketing, supply-chain, entrepreneurship, accounting and finance; 
  5. Develop self-awareness and resilience in dealing with the emotional burden of environmental change  
  6. Develop transdisciplinary awareness and understanding of how personal spheres and approaches beyond academic and scientific knowledge (e.g. cultural and traditional) contribute to sustainability 
  7. Creatively imagine and articulate visions of an alternative futures.

Textbooks and Required Readings: 

All required readings are specified in the course schedule. There will be two pieces of content (paper/report/podcast etc) to review before seminar.

Required core course textbook: All learning content will be made available on Blackboard. There is no core text book

Assessment:

  1. Attendance & in class participation (30%)
    • Attendance will be collected during each lecture. Students must attend 10 out of 11 lectures and participate in structured in-class discussion to obtain full marks. Pre-allocated presentation groups will present on each week’s content (reading/podcast etc). Pre-allocated groups will ask the presentation groups questions based on the content.
  2. Individual Essay (choice of two) (30%)
    • Due 21st October, 6pm
  3. “Campus of the Future” Group Project (Report and Exhibition) (40%)
    • Exhibition date TBC either 3rd or 10th November (during class time)
    • Report Due 11th November