The University of Birmingham has become the first Higher Educational establishment ever to introduce climate change into its BSc Accountancy and Finance degree course.
The development was led by Professor Ian Thomson, Director of the Lloyds Banking Group Centre for Responsible Business and Dr Mayya Konovalova and Dr Madlen Sobkowiak from the Birmingham Business School.
Reacting to the changes, Thomson said: “Greta Thunberg was correct in what she said in Glasgow. It is an indisputable fact that business cannot carry on as normal if we are to effectively fight climate change and reach the government’s target of net-zero carbon emissions by 2050.
According to her, this means that every student studying accountancy and finance should know how to account for climate change.
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Dr Konovalova and Dr Sobkowiak are the two academics credited with building what has been described as the new vertically integrated syllabus for the course which won the Birmingham Business School Responsible Business Award in 2021.
On her part, Konovalova said that students embarking on their journey to becoming accountants can help future proof their own careers and the organisations they go on to work for thanks to the changes we have brought into the accountancy course.
“Mainstreaming climate change into the syllabus just makes sense. Climate change is a real threat to business resilience, as well as the world at large, and nothing will change if we don’t give our students the tools they need,” he said.
Current first-year undergraduate accountancy students are the first cohort to be taught the new course in full, with second and third-year students also seeing the introduction of the updated compulsory modules for the remainder of their degree.
Story was adapted from the University of Birmingham.
