Managing New York City is enormously complicated, and reaching carbon reduction goals will be a matter of two steps forward and one step back; management innovation is necessary to bring our city government’s operations into the 21st century and hasten the transition to environmental sustainability.

Management education that omits environmental and other sustainability concerns will be inadequate as managers must navigate a highly regulated and complex organizational terrain.

Today, most of those running sustainability units are trained in other fields. As they retire they will be replaced by well-trained sustainability professionals.