The impact that organisations have on the environment has become a hot topic for businesses around the globe. Efforts to offset large carbon footprints and reduce emissions are driven by an increasing demand from consumers that products and services come from environmentally friendly sources.
Some business schools have responded by covering environmental issues in their MBA and EMBA programmes, and the first MBAs that focus entirely on green issues are starting to emerge.
In Hong Kong, the first carbon-neutral EMBA course in Asia was announced last month by the Kellogg-HKUST EMBA programme.
The carbon-offset programme was developed by EMBA students and involved collecting donations that were used to purchase carbon credits for a hydroelectric project in Chongqing.
Students began by calculating their carbon footprint by working out the greenhouse gas emissions generated by the programme.
'They knew that the faculty would have a fair amount of a footprint because we fly students in directly from the United States on a periodic basis,' said Steve DeKrey, senior associate dean at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology business school and programme director of the Kellogg-HKUST EMBA programme.