Program

The MBCS experience begins in mid-July with a three-day launch. You’ll build relationships with your cohort and faculty, strengthen your leadership and communication toolkit, and gain early exposure to tools and frameworks that set you up for success through the program. You’ll enter the classroom confident, connected, and ready to engage.

Over five terms, you’ll complete 10 integrated courses. Each course meets twice a week for 2 hours and 15 minutes. Your classes meet at Fuqua on Wednesdays and Nicholas on Fridays. The lockstep, cohort-based format ensures shared context, deep peer learning, and consistent momentum. You’ll learn more effectively by learning together.

World-Class Faculty

Learn from leading scholars across Duke’s Fuqua School of Business and Nicholas School of the Environment—experts whose research shapes global business and climate policy. They’re also deeply accessible and committed to your growth.

Team-Based Learning

From your first week, you’ll join a diverse learning team of 4–6 peers. These small groups stay together for multiple terms, building trust, refining collaboration, and modeling how high-performing organizations operate. It’s daily preparation for the team-centric environments that you'll eventually lead.

You’ll explore the full energy system as a foundation for understanding climate solutions. You’ll examine fossil fuels, renewables, nuclear energy, and grid operations, and assess trade-offs in environmental and economic outcomes. You’ll analyze electricity markets, storage technologies, emissions in transport and buildings, and emerging innovations like hydrogen and carbon sequestration. Your learning culminates in a final project and direct insights from alumni in the energy space.

You’ll apply classic business frameworks to sustainability contexts by conducting industry analysis, evaluating firm resources through the VRIN lens, and designing strategic responses to stakeholder demands. Through case studies of companies like Pepsi, BMW, and Ferrero, you’ll explore how firms pursue societal goals while managing competitive dynamics, decline, and transformation. You’ll leave with a refined understanding of how to craft strategy that integrates climate realities.

You’ll gain fluency in core valuation methods by learning to assess bonds (including green bonds), stocks, and projects in climate-focused environments. You’ll apply tools like portfolio theory and the CAPM with an emphasis on ESG risk integration. Through hands-on exercises in capital budgeting, leverage, and WACC, you’ll examine how financing decisions shift in sustainable investing contexts. This course equips you with the financial rigor needed to engage in climate and ESG finance.

You’ll develop technical and strategic expertise in GHG accounting, covering Scopes 1, 2, and 3. You’ll work with leading frameworks for emissions measurement, audit processes, and internal coordination across business units. You’ll practice setting emissions targets, using offsets and RECs, and linking reporting to strategy. In the final sessions, you’ll explore global disclosure standards (CDP, SEC, GRI) and emerging corporate practices in carbon reporting.

You’ll build a scientific foundation in climate change by covering temperature trends, emissions data, the carbon cycle, and model mechanics. You’ll examine IPCC climate scenarios, human and ecosystem impacts, and technological responses including geoengineering. Using tools like C-ROADS and En-ROADS, you’ll simulate global policy outcomes and sharpen your ability to translate science into business relevance.

You’ll learn to make data-informed business decisions using simulation, forecasting, and optimization. You’ll use Excel, Python, and Treeplan to build models around decision trees, regression, Bayes’ Rule, and value of information. You’ll also analyze sustainability-focused applications—from biofuel supply chains to renewable energy portfolios—and complete the course with a capstone case connecting business choices to environmental performance incentives.

You’ll gain a dual grounding in financial and managerial accounting practices. On the financial side, you’ll interpret balance sheets and income statements, track cash vs. accrual flows, and analyze financial ratios. On the managerial side, you’ll perform CVP analysis, evaluate investment performance using NPV and ROA, and use budgeting and variance tools. The course connects these skills to sustainability strategy and performance measurement.

You’ll examine how leadership, culture, and systems shape organizational sustainability outcomes. Drawing on behavioral science and decision-making research, you’ll explore topics such as systems thinking, motivation, incentives, change management, and negotiation. You’ll also engage in team exercises and case discussions that highlight real-world perspectives, including those of Chief Sustainability Officers (CSOs), to build your ability to lead from any level.

You’ll study how to use core marketing principles to drive environmentally responsible behavior. Through the 3 Cs (Customer, Company, Competition) and 4 Ps (Product, Price, Promotion, Place), you’ll analyze customer behavior, develop sustainable brand positioning, and craft marketing strategies that align with environmental goals. You’ll explore real-world cases like OPOWER, Better World Books, and Fiji Water, and hear directly from guest speakers in sustainability branding.

You’ll master operations management fundamentals such as process analysis, queueing, inventory models (Newsvendor, EOQ, base-stock), and quality control systems (Lean, Six Sigma). Then you’ll apply those tools to sustainability contexts, including lifecycle assessment (LCA), carbon footprinting, renewable sourcing, reverse logistics, and circular economy models. You’ll explore how AI and analytics support ESG reporting and examine trade-offs between cost, efficiency, and sustainability performance.