The negative effects that the planet has suffered in recent decades have led human beings to wage a battle against time to improve the environmental situation and promote better practices that allow climate change damages to be reversed.
For this reason, since 1975, every January 26th, Environmental Education Day is celebrated, with the intention of raising awareness about the environmental crisis that the world is going through and, even more importantly, taking necessary actions on the subject.
For this reason, environmental training is of the utmost importance at all levels, including experts from various areas, as INCAE Business School has done for many years in preparing its business professionals.
Andrea Prado, Associate Professor of Management and Organizations, explains that all students who come to the Business School must take two sustainability courses as part of their academic training, to raise awareness about their actions in the environment. and their professional activity.
They have to be aware at three levels, one is what they can do on a personal level with the management of natural resources, their emissions and their consumption decisions.
The other level is what can they do at the level of the organizations where they are going to work, many of which are going to be private organizations that want to generate resources, and we need these resources to be generated in such a way that they harm the environment as little as possible and that consider all the risks related to climate change.
The last level is that as businessmen they have to understand the role of the government in the regulations of environmental issues, because they operate in a regulatory framework that is changing to protect natural resources.
In these sustainability courses, various factors are considered important to instill in the future professionals:
Students have to take these two courses on sustainability, but sustainability does not imply the environmental dimension, but also the social dimension and the economic dimension, they are the three axes, it is that interaction between my environmental impacts with my social impacts and how that also plays a role in my profits; It is not a class only on environmental issues.
In addition, the issue of climate change mitigation and adaptation are included, because we are in a region where the vast majority of our students are from Central America, and we are a very vulnerable region, and they must be clear about those risks in business operations in the face of climate change.
The role that the private sector plays in environmental training
The role it plays is absolutely key, since it generates the majority of innovation and employment in the country. This is a topic that business schools did not see for many years.
But the issue has evolved, in the nineties it was very focused on the environment, the years go by and we realize that the issue of sustainability is not merely an environmental component, but includes a social component, and another way in which it has evolved is due to the component of climate change, in the nineties the phenomenon of climate change was not talked about as it is now.
