Climate change, global poverty and diminishing resources are a few of the big issues we will all need to get our heads around in the next decade.

And if we want big business to play a key role in tackling these problems and funding the solutions we had better hope that business leaders get their heads around them pretty swiftly.

Last week the United Nations took a step towards ensuring that they do. The United Nations Global Compact, which was established “to bring companies together with UN agencies, labour and civil society to support universal environmental and social principles”, published its principles of management education.

Signatories to the principles, which promise to develop students to be “future generators of sustainable value for business and society at large and to work for an inclusive and sustainable global economy”, include Ashridge and Warwick business schools.

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Background

• The message is clear

• Business takes the green route

• How to... be an active eco-worker

• How to be a responsible leader

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Background

• Rapid growth in green jobs

• It is cool to be green

• Busy saving the world

• Oxford cultivates green valley effect

Kai Peters, the chief executive of Ashridge, says “These principles will lead to an important shake-up for management education. Business schools have a crucial role to play in promoting sustainability because of the influence they have in shaping the attitudes and behaviour of business leaders.”

Peter Lacey, the executive director of the European Academy of Business in Society, one of the organisations which helped to draw up the principles, agrees. “We need to think seriously how business can tackle the big issues, and we need to ensure the next set of business leaders are equipped with the right skills and knowledge,” he says.

Over the next 18 months a pilot group of business schools, including Ashridge and Warwick, will translate the principles into practice. “This is a high-level framework, and business schools will need to work out how to interpret them and work with them,” Lacey says.

He is keen to point out that the principles are not a form of accreditation. But with students increasingly preferring to study at schools where corporate social responsibility is taken seriously, whether or not a school is a signatory to the UN principles might be a significant factor in their deliberations.

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