Environmental managers challenged to pursue organizational environmental stewardship, stakeholder engagement, and the economic prosperity of both their organizations and communities need to find a practical and achievable approach.
The Applied Sustainability for Your Business™ course is designed for environmental managers, sustainability specialists, and others responsible for achieving triple bottom line success.
“Written course materials will be a valuable reference document. Easy to translate into knowledge I can use.”
- Tom Gentner, Rockwell Collins
This unique course helps you identify the risks that your operation faces in pursuing the drivers for sustainability. You will learn how to determine the current state of your sustainability program and benchmark it against other programs. Using this gap analysis, you will be able to create a strategy to ensure a sustainable outcome for your organization. This short course will help you understand the three organizational responsibilities, and how they are interconnected.
You will learn a practical and logical approach for improving existing sustainability programs or implementing new programs.
Topics Covered Include:
- Create an operational definition of sustainability that works for your organization
- The three responsibilities; environmental, social, and economic, and how they are interconnected
- Determine the key risks for your operation that drive the sustainability effort
- Determine the current state of your sustainability efforts
- Benchmark your sustainability efforts
- Prepare a gap analysis between your efforts and the benchmarks
- Create a sustainability strategy and action plan
- Incorporate sustainability into an existing management system
- Mastering stakeholder engagement to guide your strategy
- Reporting your sustainability efforts
Our Continuing Education Matrix provides a summary of current professional certification credits, maintenance points, and CEUs awarded to Institute courses.
Geri Nicholson is President of Sage Energy Consulting, LLC, which specializes in developing successful energy sector strategies that substantially improve the bottom line for its clients while improving the environment. Sage Energy helps clients surpass their objectives in the areas of energy efficiency, renewable energy, climate change and green building. Sage Energy offers the unique perspective gained from drafting regulations and policies that achieve government goals and mandates, and then applies this experience toward maximizing value for its commercial customers.
Ms. Nicholson has 20 years of experience in the fields of energy, resource economics, and global climate change. Her experience includes: designing cost-effective carbon reduction policy and project solutions; crafting renewable energy and energy efficiency legislation, regulations, and financing mechanisms geared toward developing diverse markets for energy innovations; developing and managing energy projects across commercial and industrial sectors; and, analyzing barriers to deployment of next generation and innovative energy technologies and solutions for commercial buildings.
Prior to founding Sage Energy, Ms. Nicholson served as director and deputy director of the Maryland Energy Administration. Ms. Nicholson advised Republican and Democratic governors on energy policy formation, and served as legislative liaison on energy policy matters. She has also worked on siting power plants and renewable energy facilities. Ms. Nicholson coordinated State greenhouse gas emissions reduction efforts, including management of an impacts analysis, and a greenhouse gas reduction strategy of cost-effective actions. She has provided technical expertise on the feasibility and benefits of carbon sequestration, and developed a comprehensive model to project future stocks and flows of carbon in U.S. forest products. This methodology is currently being used in the California Climate Action Registry Protocols.
Before coming to Maryland, Ms. Nicholson worked as an economist for the USDA Forest Service. For the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, she oversaw development of a comprehensive Geographic Information System (GIS) tool to promote sustainable management of watershed resources. She also served as a Fellow in the Botany Department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, while working as a consulting resource economist for Yale University. She is published in the fields of resource economics, industrial ecology, climate change, and renewable energy policy. She has a Master of Science in Sustainable Development and Conservation Biology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a Bachelor of Arts in Economics from the College of William and Mary in Virginia.
Emily Pugliese is a LEED Green Associate and compliance specialist with more than 8 years experience in environmental permitting, compliance, management, and sustainability. She has extensive experience helping organizations improve their overall environmental performance through the implementation of Environmental Management Systems and other sustainability programs. Ms. Pugliese has worked with businesses, including Fortune 500 companies such as Motorola and Domino Sugar, to help them calculate and reduce the carbon footprint of their business operations and products. Her efforts helped these companies reduce waste, decrease energy and operating costs, and establish themselves as leaders in the environmental field.
Ms. Pugliese also has first-hand regulatory and permitting experience at both the state and federal government level helping businesses and Federal agencies come into compliance with NEPA, CWA, and other Federal and State environmental regulations. Her specific focus included the protection of wetland and threatened and endangered species habitat and involved conducting habitat assessments and developing and reviewing Environmental Impact Statements. Ms. Pugliese has helped businesses and land owners conserve hundreds of thousands of acres of this sensitive habitat.
