Awareness of the environmental and societal challenges facing our world has expanded dramatically in recent years. Since 2015, the year we published our inaugural report, Rising Leaders on Environmental Sustainability and Climate Change, an ongoing global pandemic has laid bare societal strains and inequalities in access to basic healthcare. Extreme weather events have intensified all over the planet. The sixth Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Report included unprecedented warnings of catastrophic global warming in the absence of immediate action. The U.S. signed—and then left, before rejoining—the Paris Agreement.

In this survey of 2,035 global business students, conducted in partnership with the Global Network for Advanced Management and the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, our key findings include:

1. Business students believe corporate leaders should be solving environmental and social issues—but they perceive the most serious issues to be elsewhere, no matter where they live in the world

2. Business students expect sustainability to be threaded throughout corporations’ highest priorities—not treated as a stand-alone top priority.

3. Business schools are integrating sustainability topics, but students are calling on them to go further.

4. The ‘carbon tax on talent’ continues to rise: Now, the majority of business students state that they would accept a lower salary to work with a sustainability-forward employer.

Our students will soon be at the helms of such impactful organizations, and it is incumbent on us to equip them with the knowledge, the resources, and the networks to pursue positive and ambitious change for society. Our schools should model how leadership decisions must account for impacts on a wide range of stakeholders, including organizations, vulnerable communities, and the environment.

-Ingrid C. Burke, Carl W. Knobloch, Jr. Dean; Professor of Ecosystem Ecology at Yale School of the Environment

-Kerwin K. Charles, Indra K. Nooyi Dean & Frederic D. Wolfe Professor of Economics, Policy & Management at Yale School of Management

Read the report for the full context and a galvanizing Foreword by Dean Indy Burke (Yale School of the Environment) and Dean Kerwin Charles (Yale School of Management).