Getting down to the business of climate change

Earlier this year, we asked our faculty and staff to tell us who among them were taking actions or driving initiatives to advance sustainability at the university. This is part one in a five-part series recognizing sustainability efforts at UBC.

Dr. Justin Bull was just nine years old when the historic United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, known as the Rio Conference, took place. Even so, the leader of the sustainability and ethics group and academic director of the Centre for Climate and Business Solutions at the UBC Sauder School of Business cites it as a defining moment in his life.

“That's a formative memory in my mind, of the world waking up to the sustainability challenges in front of us,” he says, noting that his father, UBC Forestry professor Dr. Gary Bull, was working on his PhD at the time. “I was probably more attuned to these issues than the average nine-year-old, just through exposure from the household and from spending a lot of time out in nature with my family. It was really obvious to me from a very young age that if humanity gets this one thing right, we're in good shape, and if we get this wrong, we're in dire straits.”

That sense of purpose stayed with Justin throughout his formative years, as he followed in his father’s footsteps earning a PhD in Forestry at UBC, during which he examined sustainability in the digital and paper publishing industries. Over the last year, it drove him toward leading the creation of UBC's new MBA Climate Career Track, which was recently launched at the UBC Sauder School of Business. The program, he says, was developed and approved “in almost record time”— a reflection of the urgency felt at UBC Sauder to address the global climate emergency.

“We came up with the idea last August, proposed the program to our own faculty at a town hall in November, presented it to the UBC Graduate Curriculum Committee in February, and got it through Senate in April,” Justin shares, noting that it is an expansive, cross-disciplinary program that brings a climate lens to a wide array of courses—including business economics, accounting, entrepreneurship, supply chain management, among others. It’s a curriculum that reflects the shift in attitudes about climate that have taken place in the business world over the past decade.

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“Canada’s positive contributions to the energy transition is hugely influenced by the development of new critical minerals and metals, enhancing and strengthening our electricity grids, developing a new hydrogen economy, and the effective management of our forests,” he points out. “None of that’s going to happen without the full participation of Indigenous communities, not only in the decision-making process, but also the economic upside of all of this work. And certainly, Indigenous communities historically have done a better job at recognizing the balance between human and environmental systems.”

As he looks forward to welcoming the first cohort of students into the MBA Climate Career Track, Justin says he remains positive about humanity’s future. “If you want to feel enlightened and optimistic about climate, just go and look at all the incredibly smart and talented people who are lasered in on a specific part of the climate crisis trying to create a scalable business solution,” he says, adding that he wants to help train the next generation of climate leaders working in the private sector.