Oxford Sustainable Business Programme

Climate change has become very, very urgent. It's a problem that has been with us for a long time, but we are now entering the crucial phase of reducing our emissions and moving to net zero. Now is the time when businesses really have to actively engage.

The way that we feed, clothe, transport, house, the billions of people on this planet will fundamentally have to change in order for us to respect the planetary boundaries in which we sit, both regard to carbon and regard to nature.

The Oxford Sustainable Business Programme is designed to take research from both the Said Business School and the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment, and bring together those two powerhouses on understanding net zero innovation and strategy, and how you take your net zero target from a promise into practice and deliver that through your entire business.

What we want to do with this programme is really empower and enable, equip, and give skills to those who are in businesses who need to meet that challenge.
Set the new standards in terms of what good looks like for business and even begin to shape the new and leading industries of the next decade.

The course brings together experts from across the University of Oxford. People have devoted their career to climate change. These people are combined with experts from the business school. And it's the fusion of those two skills that is the power of the course. There are senior people who need to understand the strategic implications. They're more technical people who need to translate that strategic direction into targets, into monitoring systems. And there is also the sort of the commercial side of it to turn climate change into a business opportunity.

Our aim with this programme is to equip you to have the confidence and the skills and the clarity of mind and the ability to strategise in a way that brings sustainability straight into the heart of what you're doing in your daily work.

Our aspiration in setting up the programme is that we want to make a contribution to solving climate change. And we want to make that contribution by educating the decision makers who can change business practices, who can change the economy, and can start bringing down emissions unapologetically.

It's an excellent opportunity for people to come to Oxford, one of the finest institutions in the world, and learn from some of the brightest minds in the world. So, we first get you to answer the question of what it means to achieve global net zero, and then we move from there to what the governance landscape looks like, then we take you through what that means for implementing that in your business. What does the innovation pathway look like? What should the strategy, internal discussions look like? And then how do you deal with the stickier pieces of net zero, like offsetting, or how does nature fit into your net zero plan? We have a balance in the week between lectures and delivering content, as well as interactive activities. Definitely want participants to come to this experience with readiness to work. It's not just going to be passively absorbing lectures for a week.

I'm incredibly excited to be in the room with leaders from cross-functional areas, from global geographies that, perhaps on the face of it, are very diverse, and I have every confidence that we will find that there are very deep shared challenges.

There's a bit of a race going on in terms of who will be the leaders in the net zero world. This is a process that has to start early. That planning has to start now. And if you can start that process early, helped by this programme, you will be better positioned in the net zero world.