Judge Business School has just launched what it claims is the world’s first MBA elective on climate leadership. The module, which aims to develop leadership skills needed to succeed in a world moving towards a low-carbon economy, rigorously examines the science of climate change and weighs the consequences for business.

Students are required to have a scientific background and are coached in communicating the impact of global warming to senior executives. Stephen Peake, the course leader and a teaching fellow at Judge, who is also a senior lecturer in environmental technology at the Open University, says his aim is to build awareness in the next generation of senior executives.

“The best way of persuading companies that they need to go green is by influencing the next generation of business leaders,” he says. “We have to grab them while they are young and at the beginning of their careers.”

Other business schools see things differently. Some of the more progressive schools tackle climate change and sustainability under the banner of corporate social responsibility. Professor David Grayson, director of the Doughty Centre for Corporate Responsibility at Cranfield School of Management, teaches its new MBA sustainable business elective.

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He says: “Last year was the pilot year and a quarter of our students chose to do it. We look at the issues of sustainability among producers and consumers and I took a group of 50 students to China to meet with industrial companies and politicians to see how one of the world’s biggest economies is facing up to the challenge of resource depletion.”

Grayson aims to embed sustainability throughout Cranfield MBA modules, partly through the research at the Doughty Centre. He says: “It’s a question of making researchers and academics more aware of the issues.”

Nottingham University Business School adopts a similar approach and has set up the International Centre for Corporate Social Responsibility. Wendy Chapple, the centre’s deputy director, says: “We talk about climate change as just one aspect of sustainability. We see it as the interrelation of business and the environment.”

Chapple gives an example: “Say a supermarket chain decides to shorten the supply chain to source more fruit and vegetables locally. It will need to balance the reduction in carbon footprint with the social impact in a developing country. Businesses are creating value chains by sourcing ethical or fair trade products from developing countries. They can have a positive impact on climate change through encouraging sustainable farming.”

Nottingham embeds sustainability throughout its MBA and prefers not to tackle climate change in isolation.

Meanwhile, Judge’s commitment to climate leadership stems from Cambridge University’s mission to advance this branch of science. Judge is a partner in the Cambridge Programme for Industry, which defines its purpose as “building the leadership capacity of business, governments and civil society to respond to climate change”.

The Cambridge programme runs the Corporate Leaders Group on Climate Change in conjunction with the Prince of Wales’s Business and the Environment Programme. The climate leadership elective does not pull any punches. Stephen Peake, of Judge, will tell students that a rise in global temperature of 2C over the next 100 years will bring floods, droughts and desertification, which could displace hundreds of millions in the developing world.

“Students are shocked and depressed by what they learn. But we show them that business can influence the outcome,” he says.

Engineer turns into an avid campaigner

Marisa Suk-Hui Teh, left, is passionate about fighting climate change.

As an MBA student at Judge, she helped to organise the Entrepreneurship for a Zero Carbon Society summit in Cambridge last month. Teh and her two co-founders, Cambridge academics Stephen Stretton and Gunnar Möller, mobilised the business school, physics, engineering and sustainable development departments to run an event that drew 200 delegates.

A former design engineer with Texas Instruments, Teh, 28, says: “I wanted to bring policymakers, investors and business people together because only by joining forces can we succeed in tackling climate change.”

The summit, which took in industrial designers, renewable energy companies and environmental lobbyists, could be the first of many. Teh says: “Replacing existing products with sustainable new designs is a high-risk strategy requiring a longer payback. People’s behaviours and expectations have fundamentally to change.”

She finished her MBA last month and hopes eventually to start her own renewable energy consultancy.