The Centre for Building Sustainable Value would like to congratulate Ivey PhD Candidate, Julian Barg, for receiving the Chisholm Graduate Scholarship in Sustainability. This scholarship is awarded to one graduate student with a research focus on sustainability. Selection is based on academic achievement and research excellence.
Barg researches the organizational behaviour of firms with regard to their environmental impacts – namely, how firms improve their environmental footprints, and why they might fail to do so.
He is currently studying pipeline operators and oil spills. His work poses the question of why oil spills are taken for granted as part of pipeline operations. If organizations are capable of great things – such as learning how to send objects into space in a few years’ time – why have pipeline operators not learned how to operate pipelines without leaking oil?
Barg is exploring two key areas: pipeline operators’ improvements of their environmental footprint over time; and the general acceptance (or “taken-for-grantedness”) of oil spills, and how this attitude might be changed. He applies a diverse array of quantitative methods to explore these questions, such as web scraping, natural language processing, geographic information systems, and interactive dashboards.