As a graduate student in the University of Georgia’s Environmental Economics program I found myself wanting more hands-on experiences with the triple bottom line we discussed so often in classes: people, planet, and profit. In search of a more applied track within my theory-focused degree program, I enrolled in the Graduate Certificate in Sustainability and a Graduate Certificate in GIS. These Certificate programs allowed me to explore diverse applications and perspectives in the sustainability space, and I have reflected on major takeaways and work products from each course in the essays linked below. It is my hope that these writings demonstrate the breadth and depth of my sustainability knowledge to interested clients. It would be an honor if these essays could also provide ideas or inspiration to readers interested in pursuing sustainability work themselves. As I learned from my Sustainability Seminar class, collaboration between professionals is one of the greatest tools at our disposal in accelerating triple-bottom-line initiatives.
As an introduction to my sustainability writings and work I think that it is important to reflect on the Certificate program holistically, and understand the global themes that I extracted from my experiences. For the Certificate I took courses in four spheres of learning: environment, society, economy, and sustainability. My environmental course, Ecosystem Ecology, focused on the marriage of the atomic and global scales of life on our planet. I gained an understanding of the ways that elements connect the ecosystems of the world, especially their availability and chemical configurations impact the growth of plants and climate change on a macro scale. A class project for Ecosystem Ecology was my first exposure to data science and programming, “Predicting Carbon Loss from Soils with Machine Learning” and also my first working experience with the man who would one day be my husband! Through this project I also developed a strong relationship with the course instructor, Dr. Nina Wurzburger, and went on to work in her lab for two years and co-author a paper “Differences in soil organic matter between EcM- and AM-dominated forests depend on tree and fungal identity” to be published this year in Ecology.
With a foundation in systems thinking from Ecosystem Ecology, I moved on to take my social sphere course; Environmental Law Practicum. This course was one of my favorites in my sustainability education because it allowed students to make a tangible difference in the world even while still in school. For this class, we were assigned to ongoing legal cases related to environmental justice and asked to assist in the defense of the environment and communities. I worked with a group of students to successfully make the case against siting a quarry in a historically marginalized community with an incredibly delicate watershed on the Ogeechee River. This allowed me to learn in a hands-on way about the American legal system as it relates to the environment. From this course I also got to understand more fully the pathways through which policies and regulations can impact natural systems, and how different policy designs can affect the possibility of successful community legal action. Just like in Ecosystem Ecology, this course was all about understanding a system and its impact pathways. But this time, the system was legal and political instead of biochemical!
Following my environmental and social courses, I embarked on the economic sphere of the Sustainability Capstone in Nonmarket Economic Valuation. My favorite way to explain this class to people is to ask them: “You know how on the news sometimes it will say something like: the Amazon rainforest is worth $5 billion per year in carbon sequestration?” Well, nonmarket valuation is the science of coming up with that number. Again, systems thinking was a critical component of the learning: in order to place a monetary value on environmental goods and services, a researcher must fully account for all the environmental pathways and their socio-economic impacts. It is an incredibly complex undertaking, but immeasurably impactful in the world of policy-making. Being able to communicate to political leaders and policy makers about the value of the environment in monetary terms was what originally motivated me to change my undergraduate major from Ecology to Environmental Economics and Management. In this class I had the opportunity to work with empirical data collected in Colorado and produce a nonmarket valuation for a recreation area there. This class provided me with analytical tools for approaching the nexus of environment, society, and economy and motivating policy change by speaking politicians’ favorite language: money. These tools prepared me perfectly for the final stage in my Sustainability Certificate: the sustainability courses themselves.
I took four sustainability courses, all of which focused explicitly on the triple bottom line of people, planet, and profits. My anchoring course was Environmental Economics and Policy Analysis, my capstone project working on B Corporation Certification, and my seminars Cross-cultural Ecology and Sustainability. After having studied each of the spheres of sustainability individually, and noting the importance of systems and interconnectedness in each of the spheres alone, it was no surprise that my four sustainability-focused classes also revolved around this same framework.
Environmental Economics and Policy Analysis was a course guided by a newly-published book, No Brainers and Low-Hanging Fruit in National Climate Policy, from the Center for European Policy Research. As a class, we read and discussed the policies suggested in the text for combating climate change. As you may have guessed, the discussion centered primarily on the various possible unintended consequences of each, which ranged from ancillary environmental co-benefits to concerning regressive impacts of monetary policy on society's most at-risk individuals. In this class I developed the first working draft of my thesis. Guided by the lessons learned in our readings, I outlined a new methodology for quantifying climate risk, analyzing its distribution across individuals and within an economy, and communicating the results to affected communities in a way that avoided unintended harms of risk exposure information disclosure.
The final installment of my Sustainability Certificate was the aptly named Capstone Project. This project brings together the lessons learned in all previous courses and seminars and allows students to explore and apply them to a local project. For me, this was a particularly exciting experience because I got to work in one of the two fields that I believe has the potential to most quickly address our environmental and climate crisis. I have had internships and jobs with NGOs and government agencies, as well as coursework covering environmental litigation techniques and the green economy. From these, I see the fastest channels for action in environmental law and green business practices. Litigation is a powerful tool because it can stop environmental harm from happening while legal proceedings take place. It can also be a windfall monetarily for funding restoration and reclamation work. In the other channel, businesses are increasingly engaged in Environmental Social Governance responsibility, or ESG. As consumers demand more sustainable products and processes, corporations must adapt and be ready to deliver. Both litigation and corporate ESG can be implemented rapidly and have far-reaching impacts in a short period of time. The flip side of the coin is that litigation and ESG activities can be rapidly rolled back with court decisions and the whims of business leaders. In contrast, regulatory changes which depend on political systems are more long-lasting, but slower to establish.
For my Capstone Project, I worked with a local technology firm, Can I Recycle This? (CIRT), to achieve B Corp Certification. This is an independent, third-party certification given to businesses that meet the highest standards for ESG responsibility and transparency. Working with CIRT, I was able to make those fast-paced changes with broad impacts. Some of my favorite initiatives hat I implemented as part of my Capstone Project were switching the company to hosting its web infrastructure 100% on servers powered by renewable energy, setting up annual purchases of carbon credits to make the company completely net-zero for carbon emissions, creating very generous company-wide policies for maternity and paternity leave, and setting hiring goals to focus on increasing diversity in their workforce. It was incredible to see how CIRTs desire to be more sustainable could so rapidly transfer into actions and results. In the course of one academic semester the company went from scoring only 30 points on their Impact Assessment (a measure of their ESG performance out of a possible 200) to 85 points- just enough to apply for B Corporation Certification.
By the end of my sustainability education, I found that a sustainable framework for problem solving could be summed up as this: Everything is connected, always consider every possible consequence (good and bad) of any change. Map these impacts not only for the sphere of interest (people, planet, profits), but also for the remaining two. I look forward to taking this lesson forward into my work as an environmental justice consultant, and into my life as a responsible citizen of planet earth. I believe that global changes begin locally, with individuals who commit to thinking about the consequences of their actions, purchases, and words on our global system.
I am grateful to the Sustainability Certificate at the University of Georgia for deepening my understanding of the power of systems thinking and action at every scale, and invite you to continue exploring my reflections on each sphere of sustainability, my suggested readings on each topic, and featured projects I have completed in each sphere.