This course identifies the purpose of green finance as a means to promote and enable sustainable and resource-conserving economic systems. While viable benchmarks and concepts for sustainable development exist, economic decision-makers and financial institutions by and large still focus on economic profit, leaving environmental and societal sustainability outside of their cost-benefit assessments.
In order to provide an alternative approach that guides financial investment towards green ventures, the course offers insights into sustainable development concepts and respective assessment mechanisms for sustainable corporate performance. These concepts and mechanisms are exemplified in the Circular Economy (CE) and Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), which constitute increasingly important elements in sustainable development. By adopting a multidisciplinary perspective, the classes cover the fundamentals of sustainable concepts, benchmarks on how to measure sustainable performance in the economic domain (i.e., at the corporate-, meso- and system-level) and empirical cases on how green finance has and can make a difference to promote sustainable growth.