Sustainability and Climate Change

Climate change is the result of a market failure to account for the cost of greenhouse gas emissions to society, and pricing carbon is a powerful solution to correct this externality. Studies have shown that a well‐designed carbon pricing program can motivate changes in energy use, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and guard against harm to the economy or low‐income families. Since 1990, carbon pricing has been implemented in over 40 national and 25 subnational jurisdictions around the world. Getting a carbon price in the United States will require building political will by mobilizing the public through grassroots activism.

Sustainability professionals need specialized leadership competencies to effectively influence the complex, uncertain, conflicted, and dynamic (i.e., wicked) sustainability challenges of our time. Higher education programs can teach these leadership competencies and thus help professionals gain more influence and career success. This article has three objectives: 1.) define and justify leadership competencies that sustainability professionals need to address wicked challenges, 2.) describe a pedagogy to teach these competencies to professionals, and 3.) evaluate whether intended learning outcomes were achieved in applications of this pedagogy.

In line with University of Wisconsin tradition, community-based learning was integrated into a course on sustainability as an opportunity for students to apply the tools learned in the course to community projects. Student teams spent the semester utilizing the three paradigms of sustainability to evaluate tradeoffs for the projects' community partners. The projects include an assessment of installing solar panels in a low-income housing development, salting practices with respect to mitigating chloride levels in a nearby lake, and purchasing practices in the egg supply chain of a farm-to-table restaurant. The results of the student projects are discussed, along with unexpected challenges that occurred during the course of the semester and suggestions as to how to approach these challenges in future semester offerings of the course.