Giving Compass' Take:
- Joshua Skov, Instructor of Management at the Lundquist College of Business at the University of Oregon, discusses the business strategy for adopting climate policies during this unprecedented time.
- What role can donors play in helping businesses with strategic climate-policy decisions? Why is it important to shape climate plans now?
- Read about the unique opportunity for a green recovery post-pandemic.
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In 2020, what was once unthinkable has often become headlines, for good and bad. In a year of so many crises, one bright spot has been business taking a bolder stance on climate policy—as Business Roundtable did with its endorsement of carbon taxes. Still, large questions loom not only about the implementation of such policies, but also on businesses’ focus on policy vs. changes at the level of the individual firm.
To explore these questions, we spoke with Joshua Skov, Instructor of Management at the Lundquist College of Business at the University of Oregon. In 2019, Skov was honored with an Aspen Institute Ideas Worth Teaching Award for his course, “Life-Cycle Assessment, Life Cycle Thinking, and Business Strategy.” Here’s what he had to say about how students solve complex problems by learning to balance narrow analyses with the bigger strategic picture.
Your course centers around something called a Life-Cycle Assessment (LCA) for products and services, why is this framework/tool so central to your business school course? What is the potential impact of the LCA, especially in light of the headlines of 2020?
Both LCA and its close cousin carbon accounting have emerged as analytical touchstones as companies attempt to understand what “impact” means to businesses, consumers, and society. But like so much in life, it’s as much about the journey as the destination, and I really emphasize to students the importance of setting up any close examination of a life cycle for a product, service, fuel, infrastructure element, or anything else around which a business model may be built.
If you quiz a person on the street about 2020, the pandemic and the election typically loom large. Yet this year has also brought a deluge of climate extremes and examples of faltering ecosystems, so the core motivation for the course – understanding how our economic systems are compromising the natural and human systems upon which we rely – remains intact.
Read the full article about a sustainable future for business at The Aspen Institute.