Columbia Business School's Dean Costis Maglaras says climate change will be pervasive

Business schools are geared up to prepare the next generation of business leaders to meet whatever challenges arise, even unprecedented ones.

If you ask me what's going to change the world in the next 75 years, it's going to be our collective response to climate change, Dean Costis Maglaras told Yahoo Finance Editor-in-chief Andy Serwer on an episode of Influencers video above. Every aspect of our lives is going to be transformed - every industry, every business, etc. Institutions from governments and banks to consumer-facing businesses have started to pivot towards decarbonizing global economies. Business schools have been criticized for being slow to respond.

The top business schools have a number of sustainability modules that they add to their curriculum.

It's also leading to the establishment of new schools. In July 2020, Columbia University unveiled the Columbia Climate SchoolColumbia Climate School, the university's first new school in 25 years. In May, Stanford University announced that billionaire and venture capitalist John Doerr donated $1.1 billion to the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability, which focuses on technological and political solutions to the climate crisis.

Maglaras wants to take Columbia's existing business school in a similar direction, and he highlighted that students are eager to tackle this issue.

It used to be that there were only 50 students interested in that area, like a half a decade ago, Maglaras said. We're building up curriculum in the areas of climate finance and asset pricing and risk and climate strategy. Interdisciplinarity is a feature of many climate programs and schools, including the Climate Change and Business Program, which is already offered by Columbia Business School.

The challenge is omnipresent, and that is partly due to how omnipresent it is. For educators like Maglaras, preparing students for the many scenarios in which they might encounter climate-related issues in their future jobs means leaving no part of the business environment unaxamined.

If you're a state, a country, a lot of work will have to do with how do you transition to net zero, Maglaras said. We're working on strategy courses, we're working on consumer behavior, which is important for how you and I think about this issue and how we can change our own decisions and actions. And then there were supply chains, manufacturing, and analytics. According to Maglaras, there is a degree of hands-on learning and engineering expertise, which comes from a background in electrical engineering. Maglaras is co-teaching a class with the dean of the engineering school on breakthrough technologies, in addition to the business school's clean tech course.

Columbia Business School has produced climate-conscious business leaders: Ethan Brown, founder of plant-based meat company Beyond Meat, is one of the many graduates of the school.

I think that the education will not just be relevant to the person that starts Beyond Meat, or the next one, Maglaras said. It will be pertinent for all of our graduates because they will be investing in these companies or helping transition helping companies transition, or they will work for these companies. I think it's going to be pervasive the same way that technology and being trained to thrive in the digital future is pervasive to our students.