Educational & Training Offerings

While research is important, the EEMI mission also contemplates a broad array of training and educational offerings. EEMI offers educational opportunities for leaders in government and industry to learn the value of alternative, non-regulatory solutions for achieving environmental, energy and sustainability goals. These solutions are based on voluntary, consensus standards, protocols and criteria for addressing challenges and for achieving desired levels of performance and other goals. They focus primarily on achieving efficiencies and diffusing operational knowledge and control that result in tangible performance improvements.

EEMI also offers training opportunities for students to learn how to implement management systems, to achieve efficiencies, and to implement controls so as to attain environmental, energy and sustainability goals. For example, the course Beyond Compliance: Next Generation Environmental Self-Governance (EMSE 6992-14) is a graduate-level course on implementing environmental and energy management systems offered through EEMI that is primarily based on the ISO 14000 and 50000 international standards. Another course, Global Connections: Standards in Technology, Business, & Public Policy (EMSE 6992-80) introduces students to the mildly esoteric but exciting world of standards, standards organizations, and standards development. This inter-disciplinary, graduate-level course is a welcome corrective to the existing standards education deficiency and fills the gap by developing the students’ knowledge and skills to operate effectively and provide leadership in the standards arena. It gives special attention to the exciting potential for voluntary consensus standards to promote prosperity and safety at a time when governments find it difficult to act.  

In addition to traditional classroom offerings, EEMI will offer other learning events, such as symposia, colloquies, and salons to advance knowledge and acceptance of alternative strategies among potential users and policy advocates and creators. We believe that there are a high number of government and industry-based officials in the Washington, D.C. area who believe in the power and potential benefit of these alternative strategies and are waiting in the wings, as it were, for some neutral, credible institution to take up the cause with energy and conviction. We believe the EEMI is poised to do that, raising these alternative strategies to a new level of appreciation of their potential for effective solutions and national policy.