The human side of climate change

In the big picture, climate change affects every human being on earth, but not all of us are affected equally. Poor and marginalized communities are disproportionately at risk, whether they are subsistence farmers in Africa who rely on seasonal rains for their harvest or under-resourced U.S. neighborhoods suffering from food insecurity caused by extreme weather. Many of the most vulnerable people are responsible for very few greenhouse gas emissions themselves, and have next to no say in how the world addresses the climate crisis. At the same time, some businesses that are among the planet’s biggest emitters are insulated from the worst effects of climate change and don’t always use their influence to advocate for change.

“When people talk about climate change, they usually talk about the international agreements we should have and how to navigate the abstractions of climate policy, global frameworks and emissions limits,” says Jessica McManus Warnell, a teaching professor of Management & Organization at the University of Notre Dame’s Mendoza College of Business. “It is often framed as a policy debate. Of course, the importance of corporate responsibility can’t be overstated,  but through an ethical lens, the stories of climate change are very human,” she adds. Climate, Economics & Business Ethics is an integration course offered at Mendoza that asks students to go deep into the human side of climate change and grapple with the ethical and economic implications. It asks them to consider their responsibilities to each other and to the natural world, as well as the implications this has for management. Students can even go a step further by taking action to help those most affected by the inequities exacerbated by climate change. The course, which is open to all Notre Dame undergraduate students and fulfills a University core curriculum requirement, centers on the role of businesses and economies in climate change. For a final project, students can choose to write a policy paper or to undertake an ethics project that provides them with $500 and instructions to make a positive impact with those funds. The possibilities are limited only by the students’ imagination, and the money is made available through a grant from Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business, which provides funds for the study of business ethics at universities across the country. Climate change is a multifaceted problem, and Climate, Economics & Business Ethics approaches it through several disciplinary lenses. The course is co-instructed by McManus Warnell and Eva Dziadula, a teaching professor in Notre Dame’s Department of Economics. It also brings in Notre Dame alumni with real-world experience in sustainability to share their perspectives through guest lectures. The course asks students to consider a variety of ethical perspectives, from Pope Francis’ writings about business’ responsibilities to the environment to the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Because it includes students from diverse majors, from environmental engineering and business analytics to civil engineering and global affairs, the students themselves bring unique disciplinary lenses that enrich classroom discussions. To encourage creativity, few limits are placed on how students spend their grant money. The only real requirements are that they turn in receipts showing how the money was spent and write a paper explaining why they chose to spend the money the way they did. “We want this project to be empowering. Some students ask for examples of what previous teams did, but we don't tell them very much because we want them to think of something on their own,” says McManus Warnell. “Part of the challenge with climate change is that it can feel overwhelming. It can be a bleak picture, but we want students to leave this class feeling like they can find levers to pull that will make a difference. One tangible strategy is working with organizations on the front lines of caring for our most vulnerable.”  

Outsizing the Impact

One team of students — Casey Warble, Erin Clark and Olivia Hrivnak — focused on applying the $500 grant to bring renewable energy technology to where it could make an outsized impact. “In South Bend, $500 doesn’t go that far, and we thought we could stretch the money further somewhere else,” says Warble (BBA ’25), a senior with a double major in business analytics and finance and a minor in energy studies. The students brainstormed and identified St. Bakhita’s Vocational Training Center as a place where the money could make a real difference. Located in northern Uganda, St. Bakhita’s is an all-girls school founded in 2007 as a safe haven for young women who were reintegrating into society after being kidnapped by the Lord’s Resistance Army, an extremist armed group that’s been involved in multiple conflicts in central and eastern Africa. “St. Bakhita’s teaches women how to make an independent lifestyle for themselves,” says Warble. “And we were really interested in contributing to that mission.” Warble, Clark and Hrivniak were familiar with St. Bakhita’s because of its partnership with Notre Dame. Since 2021, the two organizations have collaborated on a program that teaches women vocational skills that help them achieve economic independence. The students reached out to Wendy Angst, a teaching professor at Mendoza who has been heavily involved in the partnership with St. Bakhita’s, who connected them with school staff in Uganda to determine how the money could help the most. It turned out that a solar-powered water pump would allow major improvements in crop irrigation. St. Bakhita’s has 52 acres of farmland — a sizable spread of farmland — but the center relied on watering its crops by hand. As the rainy season in northern Uganda has grown shorter and less predictable, the school hasn’t been able to water all of their farmland effectively. The problem is relatively common in Uganda, which has some of the most fertile farmland in Africa, but lacks the irrigation infrastructure to maximize its agricultural potential.  About 80% of the country’s land is suitable for agriculture, but only a little over a third is actually cultivated, according to an International Trade Administration report. For St. Bakhita’s, a solar water pump would enable irrigation to be automated, resulting in more effective use of the farmland. “I did not realize a water pump could mean so much. It was something St. Bakhita’s had wanted for a long time, but not been able to buy,” says Warble. “When we got on the call with their team, you could see how excited they were. And we realized that spending our $500 on the pump would be a way we could make a real difference.”  

Staying Local

Another team of students took a decidedly different perspective when it came to the best way to invest the $500 for the most impact. For Ashley Cernicky, Sophia Chen and Ellie Walsh, it was important to make that difference in the local community.  They identified three organizations in South Bend, Indiana, that serve marginalized people:

• La Casa de Amistad is a Hispanic cultural center that seeks to empower youth and families.
• Motels4Now is a housing-first program for people who are chronically homeless.
• St. Margaret’s House is a day center that helps women and children living in economic poverty address their immediate needs.

The students purchased 166 South Bend Transpo bus passes with the $500 grant, which were then evenly donated to the organizations with the aim of helping in-need individuals in the near term and raising awareness of the need for long-term investment in green transportation systems. “We wanted to have an impact on the planet and community members in South Bend,” says Cernicky. “Public transportation saves on carbon emissions over other forms of transportation, and putting more money into public transportation helps make investments like electric vehicles more practical.” But for the students, the human side of making the donations really hit home. “When we walked into St. Margaret’s House with the tickets in our hands, the program coordinator told us the passes would immediately be in such high demand,” says Cernicky.  “It felt really good knowing the donation was appreciated and we were making a tangible difference.” In all, the teams presented ideas to their Climate, Economics & Business Ethics classmates at the end of the course in the spirit of concluding the class with optimism and inspiration. One team even purchased educational water filtration kits for the nearby early childhood development center, seeking to inspire the next generation to take a hands-on approach to sustainability. “Solutions to the impacts of climate change lie in collaborative efforts, and in advocacy for those bearing its costs most acutely,” said McManus Warnell. “It’s never too early to start thinking about the impacts of these efforts.”