Q&A with SIRI Faculty: Neri Bukspan
Considering your choices for Fall registration? Here's a snapshot of one of our SIRI courses!
1. What SIRI course do you teach?
I teach Sustainability/ESG Reporting (CEEN IA7755), now heading into its eighth semester. No two semesters have looked alike - the field moves that fast, which keeps the course current but also keeps me on my toes. It sits at the intersection of sustainability, capital markets, corporate strategy, governance, and public policy, and draws students from SIPA and across Columbia who are weighing careers in finance, corporate sustainability, consulting, policy, and regulation, and want a rigorous grounding in how sustainability information actually functions in each of those worlds.
2. What does the course cover and how does it relate to real-world challenges?
The course traces sustainability information from the company that produces it to the decision-maker who relies on it. We look at what companies report on environmental, social, and governance issues; the major reporting standards and regulatory approaches; how materiality gets determined; and how investors, lenders, boards, and regulators put the information to use. We also don't shy away from the hard parts, inconsistent metrics, fragmented regulation, the politics behind standard-setting, thin assurance, greenwashing risk, and the gap that can open up between a glossy report and actual performance. Because things change so quickly, current events, guest practitioners, and real company disclosures are the backbone of the classroom, not the textbook, which means students are working with the same information, and facing the same judgment calls, that they'll encounter on the job whether they land in asset management, corporate reporting, consulting, development organization, policy setting or a regulatory agency.
3. What knowledge and skills will students build for their careers going forward?
Students learn to find, analyze, and compare sustainability information; test whether claims hold up against credible data; identify what's actually material versus what's noise; and tell meaningful reporting apart from good marketing. Along the way they practice forming a defensible point of view, working across disciplines, and translating dense information into recommendations for business, investment, or policy decisions - the same core skill set whether you end up on the buy side, inside a corporate sustainability team, at a standard-setter or regulator, or advising clients as a consultant. The group project has students evaluate a real company's sustainability performance and build an investment recommendation from scratch, giving them a concrete deliverable to point to in interviews. I regularly hear from former students who tell me they're using these exact tools now, whether they've ended up supporting, promoting, critiquing, or regulating sustainability efforts. And a number have said the course directly shaped which offer they took or which career path they pursued after SIPA.
4. How has the way you teach been influenced by your life?
I've sat on a lot of different sides of these questions over the years - as a preparer inside corporate reporting, as a credit analyst, a risk officer, in capital markets, on standard-setting bodies, as a regulator-facing advisor to boards and management, and now as a company owner and board chair myself. That range taught me that good intentions alone don't move the needle, disclosure only earns its keep when it actually improves understanding and decision-making. It also means I can speak concretely to what a given career path actually looks like day to day, not just in theory, which I try to bring into the classroom when students are weighing their own next step. So I try to keep the course practical, open to competing views, and grounded in evidence rather than advocacy. My goal isn't to tell students what to think about sustainability, rather it is to give them the judgment and the tools to evaluate it critically, and to help them figure out where in this field they want to build their own career.