With six of the nine planetary boundaries already exceeded, it has become urgent to address the ecological crisis. Estefania Amer of HEC Lausanne, University of Lausanne believes that understanding the full scale of this crisis is essential for managers to engage in the transformative actions required. However, this awareness can trigger eco-anxiety, alongside unpleasant emotions such as fear, anger, sadness, or despair. While, if unaddressed, eco-anxiety and fear can lead to denial and other avoidance strategies, emotions are also powerful drivers of engagement and action, when acknowledged and adequately supported. By fostering emotional awareness and providing support, business schools can enhance student well-being, promote engagement, and prepare the next generation of managers to tackle the urgent sustainability challenges ahead.

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Earth science experts have shown that we have already exceeded six out of nine planetary boundaries (Richardson et al., 2023), with human activities increasingly pushing the planet away from the relatively benign conditions of the Holocene that have defined much of our history. This situation will lead to major challenges in the coming decades. While the threats and risks associated with the present ecological crisis and its social consequences may be difficult to hear and accept, addressing a problem requires understanding its nature and scope. In other words, without an awareness of the present situation, it is impossible for business school students, and thus future managers, to adopt the transformative approaches needed to tackle the urgent sustainability challenges we face.

While it is possible to teach sustainability courses that focus solely on goals and policies without delving into the magnitude and urgency of the ecological crisis, doing so can create a false impression that the situation is less severe than it actually is, and may lead future managers to believe that incremental approaches will suffice. Therefore, sustainability education in business schools must not only equip students with the toolbox required to analyse and address sustainability challenges, but also ensure that they are fully aware of the situation. However, learning about the nature and scale of the present environmental and social challenges can elicit what is known as ‘eco-anxiety’, which has been defined as a fear of environmental doom or a state of distress linked to the present ecological crisis, along with unpleasant emotions such as sadness, anger, or despair (Pihkala, 2020). While these emotions are an understandable and reasonable reaction to the present situation when they emerge in higher education classrooms, they often go unspoken and/or unaddressed, and students are left to deal with them on their own. This is problematic for three reasons.

First, the prevalence of these emotions in young people goes well beyond a few isolated cases. A survey of 10,000 individuals aged 16 to 25 across ten countries revealed that 59% of them were very or extremely worried about climate change, with many reporting feelings of sadness, anxiety, anger, powerlessness, helplessness, and/or guilt (Hickman et al., 2021). Second, students’ welfare should be a priority in education, as negative emotions can have an impact not only on students’ wellbeing, but also on their learning experience and academic progress. Third, emotions play a significant role in shaping both individual and collective engagement in environmental issues.

Earth science experts have shown that we have already exceeded six out of nine planetary boundaries.

Emotions are powerful drivers of action, and individuals’ ‘inner worlds’ – composed of values, beliefs, attitudes, identities, and emotions – play a key role in their engagement with sustainability, with an enormous potential for societal transformation (Ives et al., 2020). When a person becomes aware of the consequences and magnitude of the ecological crisis, the complex interplay of their individual characteristics and personal context at that specific moment shapes the emotions they feel and determines whether these emotions lead to engagement and action, or avoidance and inaction. Additionally, after becoming aware of the seriousness of the ecological crisis, these emotions and their impact on engagement can also vary over time.

For example, eco-anxiety and fear can prompt denial and other avoidance strategies (Koller, 2021; Pihkala, 2020). For some students, these emotions may trigger a rejection of the reality of the ecological crisis, hindering their ability to act. Furthermore, eco-anxiety and fear may lead students to adopt discourses, such as technosolutionism, that offer reassurance but unfortunately downplay or discount the need for action and, as a result, can prevent the students’ adoption of transformative approaches in their future professional roles (Lamb et al., 2020). However, the relationship between fear and engagement towards sustainability is more nuanced because, in some cases, fear can have a positive impact on individual and/or collective engagement. This is more likely to happen when individuals are supported in processing fear constructively and when they seek to overcome this unpleasant emotion through actions that foster a feeling of agency (Kurth and Pihkala, n.d.).

While fear and anxiety tend to result in avoidance, other emotions, such as anger, can foster engagement. An empirical study found that anger, frustration, and hope are crucial motivators in climate activism, fostering individual and collective actions, and promoting environmentally friendly behaviours (Martiskainen et al., 2020). The study also revealed that engaging in individual and collective actions brought comfort to those suffering from unpleasant emotions associated with the ecological crisis, because they felt they were doing something about it. Importantly, hope is an emotion that can not only provide comfort to students grappling with negative emotions related to the ecological crisis, but also foster engagement (Vandaele and Stålhammar, 2022). The key role of hope in sustainability education also highlights the importance of incorporating examples of companies and other organisations that have adopted transformative approaches to environmental and social challenges into courses.

Given the central role of emotions in students’ well-being and their current and future engagement in transformative approaches, a crucial first step is to create classroom opportunities for students to express, discuss, and understand their emotions. This includes acknowledging the wide range of reactions and emotions that sustainability-related content can elicit, helping students recognise how different emotions impact their well-being and engagement, and providing them with resources and opportunities to learn how to deal with these emotions.

While some educators may understandably feel that addressing values, beliefs, attitudes, behaviours, identities, and emotions in class falls outside their areas of expertise, if the aim of integrating sustainability into business education is to equip future professionals for the challenges ahead and enable them to adopt transformative approaches, emotions and, more generally, ‘inner worlds’ must be an integral part of sustainability education in business schools.

A first step, which is the easiest and yet the most fundamental, is to grant legitimacy to the expression of these emotions in the classroom and, when voiced, to acknowledge them as valid responses to the ecological crisis. Indeed, unpleasant emotions associated with the ecological crisis should not be viewed as pathological, because in most cases they are a normal response to the Earth’s current state, as well as the result of an attitude of benevolence, compassion, and love towards all beings (Pihkala, 2020).

Class discussions and debates also support self-awareness and reflexive approaches to ‘inner worlds’. These activities are relatively easy to implement and, as relational approaches, can enhance students’ well-being and promote hope (Vandaele and Stålhammar, 2022). A particularly interesting method is the ‘sustainability intervention’, where students are confronted with a real-life sustainability problem; they research it, and then design solutions that are subsequently shared with decision-makers (Shrivastava, 2010). This method allows an experiential and reflexive approach, which is particularly adapted to sustainability education. Moreover, I have found that because students contribute to real-life solutions, this approach can boost their sense of agency and hope.

Since addressing eco-anxiety and the unpleasant emotions associated with it, some students may require competencies outside the educator’s expertise, it is also essential to clearly define the educator’s role in emotional work, and establish, within educational institutions, interdisciplinary teams that include psychologists (Pihkala, 2020). These teams would support educators who wish to integrate emotional work into their courses and provide a point of referral for students needing additional support.

Moreover, some students may also feel uncomfortable with educational designs that integrate emotions, particularly if they have not encountered such approaches before. To address this, educators can adopt an incremental approach, allowing students to become more comfortable over time (Shrivastava, 2010). I have also found that teaching about eco-anxiety and other emotions through an information-based approach can be particularly effective, as it enables students to engage with emotions from the safe distance of intellectual understanding (Pihkala, 2020), which is usually closer to the educational approaches they are accustomed to.

In conclusion, sustainability education in business schools cannot afford to ignore the students’ emotions, as these are key drivers – when adequately supported – of both individual and collective engagement towards sustainability and hence of the future managers’ ability to design and implement transformative approaches to the ecological crisis.

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References

Hickman, C., Marks, E., Pihkala, P., Clayton, S., Lewandowski, R. E., Mayall, E. E., Wray, B., Mellor, C., and Van Susteren, L. (2021). Climate anxiety in children and young people and their beliefs about government responses to climate change: A global survey. The Lancet Planetary Health, 5(12). https://doi.org/10.1016/S2542-5196(21)00278-3

Ives, C. D., Freeth, R., and Fischer, J. (2020). Inside-out sustainability: The neglect of inner worlds. Ambio, 49(1). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13280-019-01187-w

Koller, S. (2021). Towards Degrowth? Making Peace with Mortality to Reconnect with (One’s) Nature: An Ecopsychological Proposition for a Paradigm Shift. Environmental Values, 30(3). https://doi.org/10.3197/096327120X15916910310590

Kurth, C., and Pihkala, P. (n.d.). Fear, Pathology, and Feelings of Agency: Lessons from Ecological Fear. In A. Harbin (Ed.), The Philosophy of Fear: Historical and Interdisciplinary Approaches. Bloomsbury. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/384689798_Fear_Pathology_and_Feelings_of_Agency_Lessons_from_Ecological_Fear

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Martiskainen, M., Axon, S., Sovacool, B. K., Sareen, S., Furszyfer Del Rio, D., and Axon, K. (2020). Contextualizing climate justice activism: Knowledge, emotions, motivations, and actions among climate strikers in six cities. Global Environmental Change, 65. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2020.102180

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Vandaele, M., & Stålhammar, S. (2022). “Hope dies, action begins?” The role of hope for proactive sustainability engagement among un iversity students. International Journal of Sustainability in Higher Education, 23(8). https://doi.org/10.1108/IJSHE-11-2021-0463