How can we turn hope into real-world solutions to tackle the biggest challenges facing our world today? How can we bridge the gender divide and create a more fair and sustainable future for all? What steps can we take to educate and empower the next generation of leaders and change-makers?

Nina Luzzatto Gardner is the director of Strategy International, a corporate sustainability advisory firm she founded in 2000. She works with companies to improve their commitment to sustainability and the SDGs, and with investors to better understand Environmental, Social & Governance risks in their portfolios. Nina has been teaching Corporate Sustainability, Business & Human Rights as an adjunct professor at Johns Hopkins SAIS in Washington DC since 2013. She has a BA from Harvard/Radcliffe, and a JD from Columbia Law School. She is the founding president of a number of professional women’s associations, on the advisory board of the Women’s Forum for the Economy and Society, and Board member of AG tech start up – Farm from a Box. Nina is an Italian and US national.

NINA LUZZATTO GARDNER

My father was an extraordinary man who looked into the future. He taught for 57 years at Columbia Law School, so he was an educator, a practicing lawyer, and an economist. In those years that I grew up, and we talked about the 60s and 70s around the dining room table, we would always talk about the whole issue of climate change, overpopulation, and human rights in general. He would egg me on about gender equality. And those were the conversations around the dinner table, so he made me think very much in terms of what kind of planet we are leaving to our children? And what should we be doing in terms of being custodians of this planet? And that we should not be using up all the resources, but actually trying to conserve them and make the world a better for the next generation.

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I have been working as an adjunct for the last 16 years, teaching business and human rights. Sometimes, I wonder if people are too much in their silos, especially in the United States, where we are pigeonholed early to specialize, and that's always a good thing, but I think because of the Italian side of me where one has a more humanistic background, I always like to have people thinking in more multidisciplinary terms. So, business and human rights are perfect examples of something very multidisciplinary that most deans don't quite know where to put it. Is this in the law? Is this economics? Is this human rights? Ethics? What is this? So, I would like all undergraduates, master's courses and especially business schools to really have core curricula focus on business and human rights and sustainability writ large because I don't think we can continue, and we are really at a tipping point.

We cannot continue thinking just solely in terms of making profits because, environmentally and in terms of the climate, we will not be able to make a profit in the same way because there are going to be some cataclysmic events. And we cannot continue making a profit off the backs of people who are working for it if they're lucky, 10 cents a day kind of thing. So, it's not possible for these companies to continue to grow at the expense of others and the planet. I'm hoping that with this due diligence directive, a lot will have to be public. It's all going to be public reporting. It all has to be reported. That's already a directive in place on reporting for investors. I'm hoping investors are going to start looking at these numbers and say, this is not sustainable in the long run.