Real-World Experience Fuels Professor Dan Esty’s New Climate Change Course

For decades, Hillhouse Professor Dan Esty ’86 has been advancing the idea that business can be a positive force for the health of the planet.

His latest undertaking — helping the World Trade Organization develop a sustainability strategy for the global trading system — is the culmination of that work. Esty, whose primary appointments are at the Law School and School of the Environment, recently returned to Yale after two years on the project. His experience will inform a new course on climate change that offers students real-life lessons in leadership.

“The benefit comes back to Yale in the form of a clearer view of an institution and perhaps an opportunity to teach in a fresh way but also then to write new and important materials that benefit from that time on the ground,” he said.

Esty, Director of the Yale Center for Environmental Law & Policy, first wrote about how to align the global trade system with the world’s sustainability goals in 1994. As a former government official at the state and federal levels, Esty has also seen how this idea plays out in policy. He has previously been Commissioner of Connecticut’s Department of Energy and Environmental Protection. At the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, he was a member of the U.S. delegation that negotiated the 1992 Framework Convention on Climate Change.

In his most recent public service role, Esty was invited by WTO Director-General Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala to co-lead the Remaking Trade for a Sustainable Future Project. As part of a group of scholars and researchers, he helped develop the Villars Framework for a Sustainable Trade System. The framework sets out a blueprint for how countries can harness trade policy to create a sustainable global economy.

Esty maintains that the global trade system is the single most critical point of leverage for driving climate change policy. And he sees last year’s United Nations Climate Change Conference, or COP28, as evidence that people are coming around to this way of thinking. For the first time, the conference dedicated a full day to the theme of trade’s role in climate action.

“That’s where trade has suddenly risen up in focus because there just aren’t many other answers about how you can get people to move together in this transformation process,” Esty said.

That is the answer that the Villars Framework aims to provide. As a co-leader of the team that developed the framework, Esty advised Okonjo-Iweala and her inner circle on sustainability strategy. But much of his time was spent “organizing the conversation” in the wider world, Esty said. He tapped into his academic network, finding participants for a series of 10 workshops that involved some 400 experts. He encouraged authorities on a variety of topics to contribute to the collection of 60 white papers that formed the background for the framework. He helped distill their findings for policy makers and the media. And then he promoted the plan in conversations with entities like the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. But he also reached beyond political, policy, and business circles.

In May, Esty presented the Villars Framework at a climate change conference at the Vatican. The three-day summit brought together faith leaders, researchers, and policy makers, including U.S. governors and the mayors of major cities around the world. The event included an audience with Pope Francis, who has urged world leaders to take action on climate change and used his official writings to spread the message among followers.

“I think what you’ve got is a growing sense that there’s a moral dimension to this as well,” Esty said. “If you are always short-term interested only in your own well-being, you might not ever step up on climate change. So you need to have people reminded that we’ve got to think bigger than ourselves and our own well-being in the short term.”

This is very much in the spirit of how you bridge the worlds of theory and practice. And I think my own experience allowed me to practice that bridging.”

— Professor Dan Esty

Working with different audiences is among the skills Esty plans to impart in his new advanced seminar this fall, which explores how the world can attain a low-carbon economy. The course will cover how change works from a theoretical perspective. Students will also become familiar with the business and industry practices that must change to move the world to clean energy. They’ll also learn about the technology and funding that make this change possible.

The substance of the course, Esty noted, is the law and how it enables the clean energy transition. Students will gain an understanding of the applicable legal opportunities, frameworks, rules, and structures and how they could be modified or remade.

“But then some of it is leadership,” Esty said. “How do you actually pull together a political coalition that is going to agree to make the change? What institutions, organizations, even individuals might be part of that change in the process and how do you get people stepping up to those leadership goals is a huge part of what we talk about day to day.”

Esty can also share with students what happens when you apply knowledge gained through research to real-life situations because he recently got a stark reminder himself. Esty said that even after 30 years of studying the international trade system, he found there was still more to learn about how the World Trade Organization works once he was in its office in Geneva. And that is exactly the kind of insight that infuses his new course.

“This is very much in the spirit of how you bridge the worlds of theory and practice,” Esty said. “And I think my own experience allowed me to practice that bridging.”