With the meteoric rise of the environmental sciences major to the top spot in American four-year college programs, teaching professionals entrusted with our nation’s future enjoy a special, new-found opportunity to strengthen America by re-engineering environmental compliance for greater success. Two pivotal topics—one as old as coal and one brand new—deserve special attention for inclusion in the curriculum.
Old as Coal Category: Learning to Walk the Talk
In the field of environmental compliance, success requires both an understanding of the challenges institutions face in attempting to operationalize compliance and a commitment to avoid the hypocrisy of asking others to do what you are not doing yourself. Each university’s internal compliance program, as it turns out, provides an ideal context in which to teach both of these critical lessons.
Every environmental sciences program major should include as part of its core curriculum for the major a mandatory class designed to evaluate the university’s internal compliance programs. The three traditional media could be covered—air, water, waste. Greenhouse gas and fresh water consumption could be added for good measure. University employees responsible for execution of compliance obligations could come to speak, as could the university officials ultimately responsible for “walking the talk” and professionals from the community with relevant operating experience. The cost, complexity, politics, uncertainty and opportunities for improvement could all be studied. Internships could be offered to provide university staff with needed feet on the ground. These internships would both provide additional resources for compliance management and provide the students a “dirt under the fingernails” understanding of compliance—something that is critical to both effectively manage a compliance organization or to articulate realistic policy designed to guide such organizations. Students could be graded on their ability to design a project that improves university compliance along various criteria: cost, quality, health, community education, etc.
The development of this kind of program might be accelerated by an agreement that provided some enforcement-related protection to the university. Local regulators should be willing to entertain such agreements due to the great value provided by ongoing, regular, voluntary self-assessment and improvement initiatives. (Of course, universities that have no environmental exposure would not need such agreements).
For those universities that take on this challenge, the most valuable outcome will not be the improved compliance that results, although improved compliance is of course valuable. Rather, the most valuable outcome will be to have taught the students that well-meaning, well-run institutions make important strides by admitting to imperfection, engaging in self-assessment, committing to improve, establishing concrete milestones by which to measure improvement, and providing its members (whether they be students, teachers or operating staff) the opportunity to become energized by the honest pursuit of a more planet-friendly operation. In the end, a well-run, student powered, faculty guided self-improvement program could ignite or expand the passion that will power the leaders of tomorrow to carry on when the difficulty of the times forces others to acquiesce. That passion is perhaps the most important gift of a good education.
Brand New Category—Understanding the New Envirofinance Era: Moving Emissions from Compliance to Finance
Marginal abatement cost curves, emissions mitigation libraries, and profit driven capital allocation decision making have not been the traditional province of environmental compliance specialists—until now. In the last twelve months, a new category of technology—called Environmental ERP—is providing, for the first time, the ability to identify and quantify on a dollars and cents basis the impact to profits imposed by a variety of environmental factors. With this kind of visibility, organizations can target the environmental factors whose reduction can be financed by the cost savings, thereby enabling the holy grail of environmental compliance—market-driven sustainability.
This new technology moves emissions management from the office of the Vice President of Environmental, where it is managed as a cost center that should be reduced every year, to the office of the Chief Financial Officer, where emissions reduction will become part of the never-ending quest to improve profits and advance competitiveness.
In this new era, environmental compliance professionals will be tasked with articulating a profit strategy based on the reduction or elimination of costly environmental factors. The lexicon of these professionals will not be limited to air, water and waste emissions calculation and limit management, but will extend to return on investment and sustainability-based product differentiation strategies. Newly minted graduates with combined expertise in both compliance and finance should find tremendous opportunity in both the commercial sector, where the skills will be used to enhance competitiveness, and in the government sector, where the focus will be on promulgating laws that properly incentivize this market-driven sustainability movement.
In this dynamic setting, the colleges and universities can play a variety of vital roles. Market-driven sustainability principles could be introduced on a conceptual basis early on to give the students perspective on the evolution of the approach to environmental management. An understanding of the scientific theories that underlie this new approach would also be important to address, as would the potential market and societal implications involved in lashing the market to sustainability initiatives. Case studies at the local, regional, national and global levels that evaluate the efforts to use these new tools, both in industry and government, will be critical to understanding the value of the approach and the method of use that will optimize the desired effect.
Environmental ERP will transform compliance and sustainability in the same way the steam engine transformed manufacturing. With much left to be written and analyzed on this transformative evolution, the universities and colleges are beautifully positioned to plumb the depths of this new approach, expedite an understanding of its benefits and areas for improvement, and arm the next generation of environmental management experts with the educational foundation they need to lead the transition to market-driven sustainability.
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