Teaching Climate Change to Business Students: A Science-led Approach
Climate change has gone from an afterthought in business education to becoming an essential component in developing future business leaders. Here at Berkeley Haas, we have adopted a unique science-first approach to teaching this subject through our course Climate Change and Business Strategy. In this lecture, you will get a taste of this approach: mastering the essentials of climate science, developing business strategies derived directly from the science, and avoiding strategies that are inconsequential for addressing climate change. Underpinning our approach is a message of optimism: while we've created a complex, systemic challenge, we possess the agency to effectively address it.
This event is complimentary and open to the Cal community. Seating is available on the day-of on a first-come, first-served basis.
Hosted by Haas School of Business
Speaker:
As senior lecturer with continuing status at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, Andrew Isaacs is one of the only Earth Scientists teaching climate science at a leading American business school.
Isaacs is a scientist who began his career in NASA’s Planetary Science Division at the Johnson Space Center in Houston following undergraduate and graduate degrees in Geochemistry from the University of Michigan.
At NASA, Isaacs led research on the Geochemistry of the Earth and Solar System. From NASA he was recruited to Silicon Valley to join a materials science research start-up, moving into management and executive roles in public and private corporations in Silicon Valley and Tokyo.
Since joining UC Berkeley in 1999, Isaacs has taught technology innovation, climate science, and climate change strategy courses for over 5,000 students. His course Climate Change and Business Strategy, launched as a pilot in 2007, is now offered in multiple versions for MBAs, undergraduates and executives, both in-person and online.
Isaacs’ climate change courses are among the longest-running at any business school, and are the most popular courses on the subject at UC Berkeley. Isaacs has published 30 business case studies, many on the business issues associated with climate change, and is completing a text designed to help non-scientists teach climate change to business students.
Isaacs has delivered executive courses for more than 100 companies in the US, Latin America, Asia and Europe, with clients including Bank of America, BP, the California Public Utilities Commission, Électricité de France, Google, Hitachi, IBM, Infineon, Intel, Johnson and Johnson, Maersk, Mitsubishi, Oracle, Sony, Toyota, the US State Department and the USDA. He frequently teaches pro bono on climate change for the community in Northern California.
In 2022, Isaacs was awarded the Haas School of Business Sustainability Teaching Award. In 2024, his case study on Net Zero won UC Berkeley’s annual Best Case Study Award.
Isaacs and his family live in rural Napa County where they operate a low-carbon ranch growing and producing wine under the Screaming Squirrel label.