Diploma Overview
The Climate Risk Assessment and Opportunity Graduate Diploma program is designed to provide opportunities for learners to develop advanced skills in areas of climate risk, in a discipline specific context to prepare learners for impactful careers relating to societal risks and adaptation to climate change. This multidisciplinary program is developed as a joint program between the Faculties of Engineering, Science and Social Science and the Ivey School of Business. The graduate diploma program provides a broader multidisciplinary knowledge related to climate risk through one required course and allows learners to develop in-depth knowledge through three courses in one of the four areas of concentration (Engineering, Business, Science and Social Science) enabling them to gain discipline-specific expertise in climate risk assessment, adaptation, and mitigation.
Ivey's Concentration: Business and Climate Impact
The Business and Climate Impact concentration, is part of a wider Western portfolio of climate-related Gradate Diploma programs, which equips working professionals in a wide range of sectors with decision-making frameworks and tools to identify, assess and mitigate risks in a business context. Just as important, this concentration prepares professionals to explore and shape business opportunities to make a purposeful and strategic contributions to solving one of the most pressing issues facing business and society.
Program Structure
Students are required to take 4 courses. Courses start in September, January, and May, and run over the semester. Selected courses are offered each semester.
Requirements for the Graduate Diploma in Climate Risk Assessment and Opportunity can be fulfilled in:
- 4 Semesters (16 months), assuming one course is taken each semester
- 6 Semesters (24 months), assuming two courses are taken each year
Courses:
Multidisciplinary Concepts of Climate Risk
Delivery model - asynchronous
This course will cover the basic fundamentals of climate risk and climate change targeted to students of all disciplines. It will be structured more towards the basic understanding and science behind climate change. This course will also tackle an interdisciplinary approach to climate risk. It will focus on the breadth of climate risk in relation to Engineering, Science, Social Science, and Business, and how these fields work together to tackle the larger problem of climate risk and climate change. By the end of the course, students should be able to understand the complexity of climate risk, including the importance of an interdisciplinary approach to tackle climate risk issues.
Business Climate Strategies in Business
Delivery model - synchronous and asynchronous
Competitive advantage can be rooted in new capabilities related to net-zero, and other aspects of the environmental and social bottom lines. Taking the perspective of general managers, we will confront difficult challenges, scientific uncertainty, and new opportunities. Overall, the course is designed to deepen your understanding of value creation, value delivery and value capture that are central to business strategy; to map a number of the complex and evolving interactions between business and society along the supply chain; and to delve into promising sources of improved competitiveness.
ESG In-Action
Delivery model - synchronous and asynchronous
Climate risk is a financial risk. While there is variability in the degree to which climate risk presents in the economic fundamentals of corporations, climate risk is so pervasive and endemic a risk, that no corporation can avoid it. With the realization that climate change threatens the long-term viability of corporations, large institutional investors and asset managers – organizations and institutions that control a large percentage of the world’s biggest businesses – have mobilized in recent years. The pressure that these institutions exert on boards of directors and the corporate governance ecosystem more broadly, is critically important to effecting change in the strategic direction of corporations.
Finance for Climate
Delivery model - synchronous and asynchronous
In Canada (and globally), innovative financial instruments offer exciting potential to help build thriving and healthy ecosystems and communities. When successful, such investment vehicles enable investors to:
- Generate profits.
- Address societal challenges.
- Strengthen collective governance through multi-stakeholder partnerships; and,
- Ensure a more efficient public and private money use by sharing risks and implementing specific incentive and measurement systems.
However, the same financial instruments can have the opposite effect when poorly designed. It is, therefore, of primary importance to understand the mechanisms of success and failure of these new financial practices.