Relevant Courses, Clinics and Practicums | Yale Center for Business and the Environment

You could spend hours finding all the courses, clinics, and practicums at Yale focusing on sustainability, clean energy, public health, social entrepreneurship, environmental justice, social enterprises, environmental protection and more...where students can learn the skills needed to address today's most pressing problems for people and the planet

We've taken the time to pull together some really interesting and relevant course experiences from across Yale for you to consider!

Are we missing something? Let us know and we'll add it!

Fall

ENV 840 Climate Change Policy and Perspectives

This course examines the scientific, economic, legal, political, institutional, and historic underpinnings of climate change and the related policy challenge of developing the energy system needed to support a prosperous and sustainable modern society. Particular attention is given to analyzing the existing framework of treaties, law, regulations, and policy—and the incentives they have created—which have done little over the past several decades to change the world’s trajectory with regard to the build-up of greenhouse gas emissions in the atmosphere.

ENV 965 Regenerative Agriculture & Just Food Systems Lab

The Regenerative Agriculture & Just Food Systems Lab capstone is a project-based clinic course for students to work with external businesses and organizations to support a just and thriving agricultural community and food system for people and the planet. The Lab hosts four semester-long projects centered on regenerative and just solutions in agriculture and the food system locally, nationally, and globally. The Lab engages with deeply challenging questions facing agricultural communities and producer-consumer networks today, encouraged by the prospect that regenerative approaches may hold the promise of repairing long-standing patterns of social, economic, and ecological exploitation and have a positive impact on the climate crisis.

ENV966 Sustainability Implementation: Change Management in Institutional Settings

This YSE Capstone course provides students with the opportunity to learn about this long history of effort to improve the University’s sustainability and engage in the real act of change management in current efforts on campus. Exploring change management theory and learning from many on campus experts, students work in groups, bringing a diversity of experiences and knowledge to the table to tackle real and wicked problems in our midst. In taking on these timely projects, students have the opportunity to tangibly impact Yale’s ongoing efforts to fully embrace sustainable operations while experiencing the friction, joy, disappointment, learning, and challenge that are all part of working to make real change happen.

ENV 639 Food Systems and Climate Services

Amidst climate change, there is an urgent need to address the sustainability challenges of agrifood systems. This course builds on mixed methods, integrating applied economics, management and information, policy, and system analysis tools to understand (and potentially solve) the complex interactions of food systems. This interdisciplinary course welcomes students with different backgrounds interested in sustainability, food systems, climate management, and policy at global and community-based scales, with particular emphasis on the Global South. It involves a weekly lecture and practical hour session for a small-medium-sized group.

MGT 929 ESG Investing

This course discusses incorporating Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) information in investment portfolios. ESG objectives are important for investors representing trillions of dollars and may affect their portfolios’ risk and return. We will consider ways of blending portfolios’ financial and non-financial goals, and the potential for ESG-minded asset owners to impact the companies in which they invest. The course will blend academic research with case studies from investment practice.

MGT 612 Social Entrepreneurship Lab (Offered in Fall 2025)

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to practice social entrepreneurship? You don't have to found your own company to make a difference. Everyone can learn from the social entrepreneurship mindset and skillset, and apply it in their own way to create social impact. In this course, we combine theory and practice, applying a systematic framework to guide students through the social entrepreneurship experience. We start by identifying a social or environmental challenge each student is interested in tackling. Students form interdisciplinary teams to immerse themselves in characterizing the challenge, ideating potential solutions, and building business models around those solutions. Social Entrepreneurship Lab is a safe space to experiment, iterate, prototype, test, and fail. You don't need to launch your venture, though some teams will. You'll meet alumni who launched new ventures and social entrepreneurs from New Haven and around the world.

EPH 555 / ENV 959 Clinic in Climate Justice, Law, and Public Health

In the course, interdisciplinary student teams carry out applied projects at the intersection of climate justice, law and public policy, and public health. Each team works with a partner organization (e.g., state agency, community organization, other nongovernmental organization) to study, design, and implement a project, typically through community-based participatory research practices. The course affords the opportunity to have a real-world impact by applying concepts and competencies learned in the classroom. Class sessions and team meetings are conducted using a hybrid approach that combines in-person, all-virtual, and virtually connected classroom arrangements. This course should be of interest to graduate and professional students across the University and is open to Yale College juniors and seniors. In addition, this course is one of the options available to students to fulfill the practice requirement for the M.P.H. degree at YSPH and the capstone requirement for the M.E.M. degree at YSE. Students who plan to enroll must complete an application, which will be used to match each student with a clinic project. Check the course’s Canvas site or contact the Yale instructor at laura.bozzi@yale.edu for more information. Prerequisite: EHS 547 or permission of the instructor.

ENV 962 Tribal Resources and Sovereignty Clinic
This clinic will identify and describe the varieties of tribal resources focusing on public lands and the limitation of the management prerogatives facing Tribal Nations under the current legal regime. It will explore those resources governed by the trust duty and the federal government’s role. The emerging green economy is revealing new resources and opportunities for tribes. It will also investigate the relations between tribes, states, and private actors in this sector. This will be a graduate-level course. This course has no prerequisites and is not capped. It requires an application. The clinic will be offered both Fall 2023 and Spring 2024. Students are strongly encouraged to enroll in both semesters and priority for spring semester will be given to students enrolled for fall.

ENV 970a,b/LAW 30164 Environmental Protection Clinic Policy and Advocacy

Follows Law School Calendar
The Environmental Protection Clinic’s mission is to train students in environmental advocacy through interdisciplinary project work in collaboration with the Natural Resources Defense Council and other public interest organizations. Students are assigned to teams of two-to-four members drawn from the Law School and the School of the Environment to work on discrete projects in collaboration with partner organizations. The clinic’s docket covers a wide range of environmental issues, with most projects integrating legal and policy components. In addition to covering current topics in environmental policy and principles of environmental justice, clinic seminars help students master the tools of effective environmental advocacy, including the ability to research law and science, write persuasively, and manage projects cooperatively.

Global Social Entrepreneurship

GSE is a semester-long, practicum-focused course that links teams of Yale graduate students on consulting projects with social enterprises. SOM offers two GSEs: GSE India (which runs Fall-2 / Spring-1) and Spring GSE (which runs January – May). In Spring GSE 2024 we will likely be working with organizations based in Nairobi, Kenya. In both courses, we work with leading and emerging social enterprises (for-profit and non-profit) engaged in economic development, sustainable energy, education, healthcare, environmental conservation, affordable housing, and other fields.

GSE is by application only. Both GSEs are full-credit courses that fulfill SOM’s Global Studies Requirement. A few links about the GSE courses:

More information on GSE India (MGT 529)

Learn more about the faculty lead here

MGT 632/ARCH 4293 Housing Connecticut: Developing Healthy and Sustainable Neighborhoods

Enrollment in this course is by application. In this interdisciplinary clinic taught between the School of Architecture, School of Law, and School of Management, and organized by the Yale Urban Design Workshop, students will gain hands-on, practical experience in architectural and urban development and social entrepreneurship while contributing novel, concrete solutions to the housing affordability crisis in Connecticut. Working in teams directly with local community-based non-profits, students will co-create detailed development proposals and architectural designs anchored by affordable housing, but which will also engage with a range of community development issues including environmental justice, sustainability, resilience, social equity, identity, food scarcity, mobility, and health. Through seminars and workshops with Yale faculty and guest practitioners, students will be introduced to the history, theory, issues, and contemporary practices in the field, and will get direct feedback on their work. Offered in partnership with the Connecticut Department of Housing (DOH) as part of the Connecticut Plan for Healthy Cities, student projects will center on community wealth building and equitable economic recovery in some of Connecticut’s most economically distressed neighborhoods, by proposing multi-sector, place-based projects that focus on housing, health, and economic development. Proposals will have the opportunity to receive funding from the State both towards the implementation of rapidly deployed pilot projects during the course period, as well as towards predevelopment activities for larger projects, such as housing rehabilitation or new building construction. Students in the course will be organized into multi-disciplinary teams including law, management, and architecture students, who will ideate together and take on specific team roles, modeling real-world project development teams. Teams will be assigned to work with non-profit developers tackling development or redevelopment projects that include affordable housing. Facilities of the Yale Urban Design Workshop will be available to students of the course. Students may have the opportunity to continue their leadership in these projects following the end of the course, in a professional capacity, as they move towards implementation. Students will interact with their nonprofit partners, the Connecticut Commissioner of Housing, Connecticut Housing Finance Authority, and the Connecticut Green Bank.

Learn more

Housing CT Fall 2024 info and application

Spring

ENV 635 Renewable Energy Project Finance

The course is intended to be a practicum, exposing students to real-world tools of the trade as well as the theory underlying them. In place of a textbook, students are provided with approximately 400 pages of actual project documents used for a U.S. wind energy project. Through weekly homework assignments, students develop the skills necessary to construct a detailed financial model, largely comparable to what would be used by an investment firm, project developer, or independent power producer.

ENV 824 Environmental Law and Policy

Introduction to the legal requirements and policy underpinnings of the basic U.S. laws, including the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, and various statutes governing waste, food safety, and toxic substances. This course will examine and evaluate current approaches to pollution control and resource management as well as the "next generation" of regulatory strategies, including economic incentives, voluntary emissions reductions, and information disclosure requirements. Mechanisms for addressing environmental issues at the local, regional, and global levels will also be considered. Scheduled examination

ENV 742b Fundamentals of Working with People

Using environmental science to help inform and change human actions is a key challenge for environmental managers. Doing so requires that professionals be able to work effectively with a wide range of people across different scales, including: (1) understanding their own values and ways of working, as well as those of others; (2) forming, working in, and leading teams reflecting a diversity of experiences and skills; and (3) navigating and influencing organizations and networks within which they are working. The purpose of this course is to introduce students to the scholarship being done (mostly within management fields) on how best to make these connections, as well as the ways individuals are putting those lessons learned into action.

ENV 635b Renewable Energy Project Finance

The course is a highly interactive practicum, taught by Daniel Gross (a Yale College, SOM and YSE alumni) who brings over 20 years of expertise in deploying clean energy at scale through innovative finance and investing mechanisms. This course exposes students to real-world tools of project finance as well as the theory underlying them. In place of a textbook, students are provided with approximately 400 pages of actual project documents used for a U.S. wind energy project constructed relatively recently. The document set is akin to what one would encounter if working for a utility project developer, project finance lender or infrastructure equity investment firm. This course continues to be one of the largest elective courses at YSE or SOM. This past year, due to incredibly high enrollment in the course with over 200 students taking the course, CBEY provided special support for the course. We identified and hired 5 alumni, who were previously teaching fellows for the course, to support the evaluation and grading of the student deliverables. This allowed all the students who were interested in taking the course to participate.

ENV 953b Sustainable Business Capstone Consulting

The intended outcome of this course is to provide you with a ‘capstone’ experience; consulting to established organizations confronting real-life challenges at the intersection of business and environmental sustainability. The course is designed for you to apply tools and insights gained in this and other courses to a defined project, creating deliverables that will be useful to the partner organizations.
This course is designed to help prepare anyone who wishes to become a consultant after graduation; though it is also intended to be useful for those that intend engaging with consultants in their career post-Yale. In short, there is hopefully something in it for many of you! The brief from the client will be topical and relevant to challenges and opportunities faced by their organization and intersect business and environmental opportunity. It is also likely to surface potential trade-offs and require addressing cross-cutting critical issues of justice, equity, diversity and inclusion; all complicated by living through, and emerging from, the pandemic. Consulting teams will be consistently applying tools learnt in this and other courses, and the clients will be on hand to provide insight and guidance at points throughout the term.

ENV 956b Strategies for Land Conservation

This is a professional seminar on private land conservation strategies and techniques, with particular emphasis on the legal, financial, and management tools used in the United States. The seminar is built around presentations by guest speakers from land conservation organizations. Speakers are assigned topics across the land conservation spectrum, from identification of target sites, through the acquisition process, to ongoing stewardship of the land after the deal is done. The tools used to protect land are discussed, including the basics of real estate law, conservation finance, and project/organization management. Students are required to undertake a clinical project with a local land conservation organization. Enrollment limited to twenty-five; preference to second-year students if limit reached.

MGT 801: Impact Measurement and Financial Reporting in the Social Sector

Description:
This course will provide you with technical skills to evaluate performance in the social sector, namely by measuring impact and analyzing financial reports. You will be introduced to tools and methods to measure social impact, with an emphasis on causality and cost-benefit tradeoffs. Sequentially, you will acquire the technical knowledge to interpret the financial statements of nonprofit organizations (topics include expense classification, contributions, donors-imposed restrictions, endowments, etc.). I draw on real examples and use cases to apply the concepts. The course will benefit students interested in leadership or directorship at nonprofit, social, and religious organizations, as well as students who intend to take up positions in corporate social responsibility, impact investing, grantmaking, or ministry.

MGT 865 Global Social Entrepreneurship

The spring 2025 Global Social Entrepreneurship (GSE) course will be likely working with organizations in Sao Paolo, Brazil. Like the GSE India course (MGT 529), Spring GSE links teams of Yale students with local social enterprises, channeling the skills of Yale students to assist the organizations to expand their reach and impact on “base of the pyramid” communities. Yale students partner with mission-driven social entrepreneurs (SEs) to focus on a specific management challenge that the student/SE teams work together to address during the semester. The course covers both theoretical and practical issues, including case studies and discussions on social enterprise, developing a theory of change and related social metrics, financing social businesses, the role of civil society, framing a consulting engagement, managing team dynamics, etc.

Learn more about the faculty lead here

ENV 962 Tribal Resources and Sovereignty Clinic
This clinic will identify and describe the varieties of tribal resources focusing on public lands and the limitation of the management prerogatives facing Tribal Nations under the current legal regime. It will explore those resources governed by the trust duty and the federal government’s role. The emerging green economy is revealing new resources and opportunities for tribes. It will also investigate the relations between tribes, states, and private actors in this sector. This will be a graduate-level course. This course has no prerequisites and is not capped. It requires an application. The clinic will be offered both Fall 2022 and Spring 2023. Students are strongly encouraged to enroll in both semesters and priority for spring semester will be given to students enrolled for fall.

MGT 826 Inclusive Economic Development Lab (IEDL)

The Spring 2025 Inclusive Economic Development Lab course explores the theme of Harnessing Data for the Public Good. This is a project-based class where students will have the opportunity to engage with key actors in neighborhoods in New Haven, CT and potentially other U.S. Cities to develop a concrete class deliverable providing a set of analyses or practice modules that city and community actors can use to enhance inclusive economic development. Over the semester, the class will work on: 1) production of a season of the CitySCOPE podcast, 2) a public curriculum deck showcasing key learnings from the semester, and 3) a specific client deliverable based on team project. See website for more info on past projects: https://iedl.yale.edu/

Course is by application only, Round 1 deadline: November 8th, 2024

Spring 2025 MGT826 IEDL application: https://yale.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_8pq9o4zpmZj8Udg

ENV 970a,b/LAW 30164 Environmental Protection Clinic Policy and Advocacy

Follows Law School Calendar
The Environmental Protection Clinic’s mission is to train students in environmental advocacy through interdisciplinary project work in collaboration with the Natural Resources Defense Council and other public interest organizations. Students are assigned to teams of two-to-four members drawn from the Law School and the School of the Environment to work on discrete projects in collaboration with partner organizations. The clinic’s docket covers a wide range of environmental issues, with most projects integrating legal and policy components. In addition to covering current topics in environmental policy and principles of environmental justice, clinic seminars help students master the tools of effective environmental advocacy, including the ability to research law and science, write persuasively, and manage projects cooperatively.

ENV 971b Land Use Clinic

This course explores the multifaceted discipline of land use and urban planning and their associated ecological implications. Numerous land use strategies are discussed, including identifying and defining climate change mitigation and adaptation strategies, including affordable housing, community revitalization, energy development, and siting, equitable community engagement, transit-oriented development, building and neighborhood energy conservation, distressed building remediation, jobs, and housing balance, coastal resiliency, and biological carbon sequestration.

ENV 979b Climate Solutions Capstone: Sub-National Actors

This capstone course provides students the opportunity to work in teams with clients from state government, city government, academic institutions and/or the non-profit sector. Representative clients may include the State of Connecticut, the City of New Haven, the US Climate Alliance, SustainableCT, Yale University, AudubonCT, the Trust for Public Land, Save the Sound, or similar organizations. Students will analyze, model, and/or implement de-carbonization policies and programs in key sectors, including electricity, buildings, transportation, materials management, and/or natural/working lands.

ENV 985b Capstone: Neighborhood Planning Workshop

This capstone workshop provides an opportunity for students to apply the theory of practice developed in ENV 817 (or comparable study/experience) to a real-world, local urban planning project as part of an interdisciplinary student team. Up to two teams of up to six students each will work together, for a client, to develop a strategy for a neighborhood in New Haven or its environs. The emphasis in each neighborhood will be on identifying and overcoming the tensions and conflicts between economic, social, and environmental objectives to develop a balanced strategy for each neighborhood that meets stakeholders’ goals while acknowledging the context of overarching regional, national, and global challenges and opportunities (e.g., climate change, demographic shifts). Toward that end, students are exposed to the detailed processes of local government as well as techniques used by city planners to collect and assess data and combine those quantitative tools with stakeholder engagement to develop strategies to achieve community vision. With a focus on interdisciplinary problem-solving and the collective project management resulting in a client-driven work product, students learn valuable skills for their future careers.

EPH 555 / ENV 959 Clinic in Climate Justice, Law, and Public Health

In the course, interdisciplinary student teams carry out applied projects at the intersection of climate justice, law and public policy, and public health. Each team works with a partner organization (e.g., state agency, community organization, other nongovernmental organization) to study, design, and implement a project, typically through community-based participatory research practices. The course affords the opportunity to have a real-world impact by applying concepts and competencies learned in the classroom. Class sessions and team meetings are conducted using a hybrid approach that combines in-person, all-virtual, and virtually connected classroom arrangements. This course should be of interest to graduate and professional students across the University and is open to Yale College juniors and seniors. In addition, this course is one of the options available to students to fulfill the practice requirement for the M.P.H. degree at YSPH and the capstone requirement for the M.E.M. degree at YSE. Students who plan to enroll must complete an application, which will be used to match each student with a clinic project. Check the course’s Canvas site or contact the Yale instructor at laura.bozzi@yale.edu for more information. Prerequisite: EHS 547 or permission of the instructor.

ENV 811 / MGT 566 ESG Controller

ESG is coming of age. For years, ESG has been the playground of specialists carving out new horizons of risk assessment, opportunity, accounting and financial modeling. But this is all changing. A large segment of investors, represented by somewhere around 40% of global AUM has been pushing regulators around the world to create rules for consistent, comparable and trustworthy information on key ESG risks.

This class will teach you to be an ESG Controller. While that is not the career aspiration for most of you, it is critical to understand the ESG Controller role if you are to function in the ESG and business world of tomorrow. This is because a large portion of ESG is going to be ‘internalized’ by companies as a result of these disclosure regulations and the exponentially improved understanding of fiduciaries when this data becomes mainstream to investment decisions.

MGT 920 Natural Capital (100% synchronous online)

Natural resource constraints affect most, if not all, functional areas of the modern corporation. Many large companies are taking proactive approaches to managing these risks and capturing the opportunities they create. As such, they are increasingly expecting their employees to have a basic familiarity with the environmental and social, as well as the economic, megatrends affecting the resource systems on which they depend.

MGT 842 Financing Green Technologies

This course will explore how investing in renewable energy is different than in investing in more prosaic sectors. These differences include capital intensity, commodity markets, mature industry structure, local and federal regulation, and market imperfections. The course will also review the differences in policy support given to renewable energy in other countries. While the emphasis is on renewable energy, many of the same issues obtain in considering other green technologies—from water to new packaging. The course will rely on real-life case studies to illustrate themes and to expose students to different end markets and to companies along the maturity cycle from early stage ventures to projects using mature technology.