Course details
Fundamental Concepts of Sustainable Business
This course provides a rigorous historical and conceptual analysis of sustainability as it applies to business enterprise. It analyses the way in which the concept of sustainability has developed in the literature over the past four decades; the parallel emergence of sustainability challenges in the global business environment, including issues of energy, water, biodiversity, climate change, social impacts and the carbon constrained economy; the theoretical challenges mounted by sustainability concepts to theories of the firm, with a particular focus on the concepts and values associated with ‘externalities’ and ‘corporate social responsibility’; the evolution of community and business attitudes to sustainability, embedded in the concept of the ‘license to operate’ in the developed world, particularly Australia, Europe and the United States over the past four decades; sustainability trends in India and China; the impacts of sustainability concepts on the core functions of business, including strategy development, marketing, finance and accounting, operations, and organisational development, and the multidisciplinary theoretical foundations of the principles and practice of sustainable business.
Foundations of Environmental and Natural Resource Economics
This course provides an introduction to the foundational concepts of environmental and natural resource economics, which is the disciplinary foundation for sustainable business. It presents the basic principles of welfare economics, on which these disciplines are based, within economics and in its application to the environment; the physical and economic impact of a business enterprise on the environment, analysed in terms of pollution, through the different categories of pollutants, the way in which pollution targets are set, and the economic instruments, such as permits or trading, that can be used to attain them; cost-benefit analysis, a central tool of economic analysis in both the private and public sector, with a critical examination of debates on social discounting, and on the limitations of and alternatives to CBA; the theory and practice of valuing the natural environment, particularly the categories of value, and the empirical methods used to assign monetary value; the economics of natural resource extraction, and its direct link to sustainability; and the nature and dynamics of renewable resources, with examples of open-access and private-property models in fisheries and forests, the distinction between economic and social efficiency, and the determination of resource use limits.
Risk and Uncertainty Analysis for Sustainable Business
This course provides an introduction to the foundational concepts of risk and uncertainty analysis as it is applied to business enterprise. The topics presented in the course include a theoretical analysis of the concepts of risk and uncertainty, with their application to economics in the ideas of risk neutrality/aversion/preference, certainty equivalence, expected value and utility, and the cost of risk bearing; the domain of application of these principles to sustainability decision-making, including the key concepts of thresholds, irreversibility, non-linear dynamics, safe minimum standards, and the precautionary principle; decision analysis principles and practice, including a theoretical account of probability and probabilistic risk analysis, the development of influence diagrams and decision trees, with a consideration of values, utility, and optimization; a review of other key approaches to analysing and modelling risk and uncertainty, such as simulation and multi-attribute analysis; the application of these methods to the task of environmental risk management in sustainable business, with a particular focus on strategy development, operations and whole-of-business modelling; and review and analysis of some major international case studies, with a range of risk adequacies and their respective outcomes.
Climate Change and Corporate Management
This course presents a comprehensive introduction to the changes in the global business environment presented by climate change and considers their implications for corporate management. It includes an overview of the current assessment of climate science developed by international centres, focusing on physical and social impacts, mitigation strategies and projections to 2100; the history and current status of attempts by the international community to meet the challenge of climate change, through such mechanisms as the Kyoto Protocol, with its critiques, and the responses of the major international emitters, and detailing the climate debate in Australia; the emergence of the first Emissions Trading Scheme in Europe, with an assessment of its achievements and problems, and a discussion of ways in which the ETS might be reconfigures to meet these shortfalls; the emerging business discipline of carbon management, including the measurement and management of the carbon footprint generated by a company’s operations, the financial options opening for the company with emerging emissions trading schemes, and the interaction of companies with government regulation, including carbon taxes; and the significant change to the external business environment produced by climate change, with its strategic reconfigurations, for such major industry sectors as utilities, energy, resources, agribusiness, manufacturing and financial services.
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