After 10 Years, NYU Stern’s Sustainability Push Moves From Proof To Practice
Tensie Whelan (center), Stern alumni, and CSB partners celebrate a decade of leadership at the NYU Stern Center for Sustainable Business 10-Year Anniversary Gala.
Georgia Mohrbacher went to undergrad intending to study environmental science, an interest that never went away, even as she pivoted to business.
Early in her finance career, she found herself returning to the same question: How do you connect sustainability to investment decision-making in a rigorous way? She tailored her MBA search around finding that answer.
She landed at New York University’s Stern School of Business, home to the Center for Sustainable Business (CSB), a pioneering research, teaching, and thought leadership hub focused on linking sustainability to financial performance.
Her moment of clarity came in her very first session of Professor Tensie Whelan’sSustainability for Competitive Advantage, the center’s flagship course.
“It was the first time anyone had explicitly and rigorously shown me the link between sustainable business practices and financial return, not as a feel-good narrative, but as a measurable driver of value,” says Mohrbacher, MBA ‘24, now an ESG lead at TowerBrook Capital Partners.
“I can draw a direct line from the Center for Sustainable Business to where I am today.”
Ten years after its founding, NYU Stern’s Center for Sustainable Business is entering a new phase that reflects a broader shift in how companies approach sustainability. Now, under new leadership, the center’s focus is shifting from proof to practice. As supply chains strain and markets grow more volatile, the question is no longer whether sustainability creates value, but how to put it to work at scale.
The sustainability landscape looked very different in 2016, when NYU Stern first approached Whelan about teaching. At the time, Whelan had spent 15 years leading the Rainforest Alliance, where she saw firsthand how sustainability could create value across global supply chains.
Farmers improved yields and lowered input costs. Brokers reduced theft and insurance expenses. Companies saw stronger sales, pricing power, and sourcing stability. But, no one was actually tracking sustainability’s financial returns and, therefore, they weren’t driving business decisions.
Whelan proposed creating the CSB not as a traditional sustainability program, but as a center focused on performance. While peer schools were building sustainability offerings, Stern — positioned at the heart of global finance — could lead by tying sustainability directly to financial outcomes.
“I said, ‘Here’s what I think it should look like. Here’s what I want to do with it, and, by the way, I’ll raise some money for it,’” says Whelan, NYU Stern Distinguished Professor of Practice Emerita and a 2023 Poets&QuantsBest Undergraduate Business Professor.
Whelan designed the center on three core pillars — education, research, and thought leadership.
Over the past decade, more than 1,500 Stern students have taken its flagship course. Another 300 MBAs have specialized in Sustainable Business & Innovation, now a top-10 MBA specialization. More than 1,600 executives have completed certificate programs through the center. A new executive course based on CSB’s proprietary Return on Sustainability Investment (ROSI) methodology will launch this spring.
The center also supports summer fellowships, pitch competitions, mentorships, and skills-based bootcamps. EmpowHER, for example, aims to place more women in sustainable finance roles — and has become a draw for prospective students.
Tensie Whelan, former president of the Rainforest Alliance, founded NYU Stern’s Center for Sustainable Business in 2016 to connect sustainability with financial performance and embed it into core business strategy.
A decade ago, outside of sectors like consumer goods and apparel, sustainability was rarely central to business strategy. For most companies, it was a compliance exercise — something to report on, not something to run the business with, says Tensie Whelan.
Even as ESG reporting expanded, companies focused on what could be measured and disclosed, often at the expense of what actually created value.
Tensie Whelan
“It was basically the tail wagging the dog because one problem with ESG reporting metrics is they are process- and output-based, not performance- and outcome-based,” Whelan says.
In other words, companies were tracking policies, not results, making it difficult to tie sustainability efforts to financial performance.
“We need to be talking about sustainability through a business lens,” Whelan says. “Let’s not talk about climate change in terms of greenhouse gas emissions. Let’s talk about climate change in terms of resiliency in your supply chains, in terms of energy cost savings, in terms of reduction of exposure to energy pricing volatility.”
Applied research, in fact, is central to CSB’s mission. Its Return on Sustainability Investment (ROSI)methodology helps companies monetize sustainability initiatives – from operational efficiency and risk reduction to revenue growth and talent retention.
Early on, Whelan and her team outlined the first version of the business case in a 2016 Harvard Business Review article. One of its first major projects – a partnership with McDonald’s, Cargill, and The Nature Conservancy – studied cattle ranching in Brazil. The team found that more sustainable practices, particularly those reducing deforestation, led to higher productivity and quality for ranchers while lowering risk, improving efficiency, and providing more reliable supply for companies.
That work became the foundation for ROSI in food and agriculture. CSB has since expanded the framework into sectors including apparel, automotive, and energy decarbonization.
Alongside ROSI, the center developed its annual Sustainable Market Share Index (SMSI) which benchmarks performance of sustainability-marketed products using real retail purchasing data rather than surveys. SMSI findings challenge the persistent assumption that consumers say they care about sustainability, but don’t actually buy them. In recent analyses, sustainable products grew roughly 4.8 to 4.9 times faster than conventional alternatives.
The Invest NYC SDG Initiative, launched in 2019, uses the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals as a framework for concrete, investable projects on the ground in New York City. The initiative brings together government, private sector, and community stakeholders to tackle issues like carbon reduction, urban mobility, and food insecurity as business opportunities.
After 10 years at the helm of CSB, Whelan is stepping back from day-to-day leadership. She will remain involved as professor emerita and a senior advisor, continuing work on initiatives like private equity while shifting her focus toward research and writing.
Taking over is Amy Skoczlas Cole, who joined in January after a three-decade career in sustainability across nonprofit and corporate roles. She helped build some of the first partnerships between companies and environmental organizations in 1990s, and was Chief Sustainability Officer for eBay and then Pentair, a Fortune 500 manufacturing company in Minnesota. For the past six years, she was president of Intelligence + Influence at Farm Journal, the leading U.S. agricultural media and business information company, helping farmers and ranchers use sustainability data to drive better outcomes.
Throughout her career, she’s been asked what she thinks sustainability is.
“I think that one of the things that we need to understand is that sustainability isn’t a subject; It’s a capability. It’s a way of systems thinking,” she says.
“In a business context, it’s the capability that looks at what external systems the company is impacting. But the reverse is also true: What is the company dependent on, how are those things changing, and how does that impact financial performance?”
If climate change means a company can no longer grow coffee or cocoa, or workers strike because they were treated poorly, that’s a severe threat to the bottom line.
“That’s what sustainability actually is. It’s the company impacting the outside, and the outside impacting the company. It’s really a core business strategy job,” Cole says.
Amy Skoczlas Cole is introduced as CSB’s new Director at the 10-Year Anniversary Celebration.
In its first phase, CSB proved the business case for sustainability, Cole says. Her goal is to embed that proof into how companies actually make decisions.
“Sustainability may have had a special snowflake status for a while. But sustainable business is finally growing up. We’re sitting at the adult table,” she says.
She describes this moment as liminal, a transition from theory to execution in a period when nothing is business as usual. The world is already pushing past the 1.5 degrees Celsius threshold while geopolitical tensions continue to disrupt critical supply routes like the Strait of Hormuz.
Amy Skoczlas Cole
Cole’s strategy will center on three priorities: platform, process, and people.
Platform is about delivery, turning research into tools companies actually use. That includes integrating frameworks like ROSI into workflows and, critically, into AI systems. The goal is to make sustainability value creation part of the objective from the outset.
Process is about embedding sustainability into core business decisions. That shift is already showing up in how the center works with companies. This year’s case competition, for example, is being run in partnership with eBay, asking students how the company can use its marketplace to make circularity the default for Gen Alpha shoppers.
“This is not about how eBay can embed sustainability into its business analytics but about how it can use it as a point of leverage to actually meet a business goal,” Cole says.
“eBay is interested in getting Gen Alpha out there and creating that circular fashion economy, not because it’s green, but to acquire customers and create a competitive advantage. It’s a business goal at the end that is being achieved via good sustainability systems thinking.”
People may be the most critical piece. Sustainability, at its core, is a change management challenge. And, that work begins in the classroom.
At Stern, the goal is not to create a separate sustainability track, but to embed it across all business functions. In other words, to make every role for Stern graduates a sustainability job.
“The super power we want our students to have is the ability to understand what’s going on outside – geopolitically, economically, environmentally, socially – and translate that into value creation for the companies they’re working for. That will make them invaluable,” Cole says.
“I can’t tell you what the future of jobs will look like 10 years from now, but I can say that if you have that skill, you’re not going to be disintermediated by a computer.”
Throughout her Stern MBA, Mohrbacher stayed deeply involved with CSB. She was co-president of Stern’s Social Impact and Sustainability Association and competed in a case competitions, applying ROSI to real business problems in front of industry leaders. One of the judges was an advisory board member at TowerBrook Capital, where she now works.
Georgia Mohrbacher, MBA ’24
Today, she uses those same tools in private equity, where every initiative must be backed by a clear financial case.
“ROSI gives me a common language to use with CFOs and management teams who might be skeptical of sustainability as a concept but respond immediately when you show them the financial return on a specific practice,” she says.
“If you walk into a room and talk about sustainability as a moral obligation, you’ll get polite nods and very little budget. If you walk in with data, you get a very different conversation.”
She can point to a clear example from her own work. In one case, her team used ROSI to quantify the financial impact of a safety initiative at a portfolio company, capturing productivity losses and hidden costs that would otherwise go uncounted.
“The analysis demonstrated meaningful cost savings and showed how a strong safety record could act as a margin-accretive lever,” she says. “It’s the difference between saying ‘safety matters’ and saying, ‘here’s the productivity gain and cost savings from reducing your incident rate by X%.’”
Looming over everything – including sustainability gains – is artificial intelligence. For Cole, it represents both the biggest risk and the biggest opportunity.
CSB is already working with tech and AI-adjacent companies, drawing on NYU’s broader ecosystem of entrepreneurs and innovation. But the conversation around AI often focuses on the wrong problem, Cole says.
“Think about all of the things that AI is being considered to do. It’s going to optimize without taking sustainability into consideration, unless we bake into its training the sustainability value creation that is possible,” Cole says.
That creates a narrow window of opportunity. The frameworks CSB spent the past decade developing already exist. The challenge is ensuring they are integrated into the systems and algorithms shaping the next generation of business decisions.
“AI has no value. AI has an objective. And if sustainability isn’t in that objective, AI is going to be very good, very fast, at a scale we have never seen before, at making exactly the wrong calls.”
