Petra Molthan-Hill

Prof Dr Petra Molthan-Hill, PhD, MBA, MDiv, PFHEA, is Professor of Sustainable Management and Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) at Nottingham Business School and Co-Chair of the United Nations Principles for Responsible Management Education (PRME) working group on climate change and environment.

Professor Molthan-Hill is an international multi-award-winning expert for Climate Change Mitigation Tools in Business, Climate Change Education and Carbon Literacy. She leads the ‘Carbon Literacy Training for Business Schools, Universities and beyond’ (CLT4BS), a training programme developed by her team at Nottingham Business School in collaboration with the UN PRME Champions, the international student organisation ‘oikos International’ and The Carbon Literacy Project and distributed worldwide in collaboration with UN PRME, for example as part of a global social movement to coincide with the COP26 UN Climate Change Conference Train the Millions - The Carbon Literacy Chain .

Professor Molthan-Hill also led the design of NTU’s ‘Carbon Literacy Training for staff and students in universities: A systems approach’ which has been adopted by educational institutions across the world. For example, over 400 students from 44 countries took part in the Global University Climate Forum organised by Yale and experienced a taster session of the CLT in November 2020 with students taking the full CLT for universities from November 2020 to January 2021. Students then reported on their ideas execution six months down the line; successfully completed projects will be included in a publication presented during the 26th session of the Conference of the Parties (COP26).

Professor Molthan-Hill has worked with companies from SMEs to large organisations such as the NHS, in how to integrate greenhouse gas management and climate solutions. For her work, she won several awards, among them theBest Professional Development Workshop of the MED at AOM 2021: "Preparing the Manager for Climate Change: From Awareness to Action", the UN PRME Faculty Award Runner-Up 2021, the Sustainability Professional Award in the Green Gown Awards 2016 and ‘The Guardian University Award 2015 for Business Partnership’ (Greenhouse Gas Management Project) together with NetPositive Ltd.

Professor Molthan-Hill has widely published about Climate Change Education and ESD, for example summarising the current knowledge and practices in three Handbooks and two Encyclopaedias. She is the editor of ‘The Business Student’s Guide to Sustainable Management’ which offers seminars and other teaching material in how to integrate the Sustainable Development Goals into accounting, marketing, HR and other subjects in management/business studies, but also ideas on how to teach system thinking, corporate peace-making and the crowdsourcing of sustainable solutions. The second edition is part of the PRME book series and published by Routledge.

Career overview

Petra started and led the Green Academy at Nottingham Trent University from 2013-2021 with the aim to include ESD related curricular and extra-curricular initiatives into the whole university. For example the internal online course offered to all 32,000 students at NTU: ‘Sustainability in Practice Certificate’ (Shortlisted Green Gown Award 2014, practical challenge day shortlisted in the Green Gown Awards 2017, now three topics on offer: Food, Energy and Clothing). She co-created NTU’s ‘Future Thinking’ Framework in 2016, which includes reference to the Global Sustainable Development Goals and was rolled out within an institutional Curriculum Refresh.

As NBS Sustainability Coordinator, Petra was responsible for embedding sustainability and business ethics into the curriculum of Nottingham Business School. She was the Academic Lead for PRME in the School, the Chair of the TILT group ‘Education for Sustainable Futures’ and the Lead for the Pedagogical Research of the Responsible and Sustainable Business Lab.

In 2017/2018 Petra undertook research with 'Coronation Street' - a popular television programme in the UK - about their impactful carbon literacy training and co-developed the ‘Carbon Literacy Training for Business Schools’ based on these insights.

In 2016/2017, Petra reconceptualised the Sustainable Development Assessment Tool (SDAT) of NHS England funded by, and accountable to, NHS England and Public Health England to work across the NHS, public health and social care system together with Dr Michael Hewitt from NBS and the Sustainable Development Unit (SDU).

After a ‘Master of Divinity’ (‘Erstes und Zweites Theologisches Examen’) and running a company for four years in Germany, Petra did an MBA at Manchester Business School, UK, from 1999-2001. While doing her PhD at NTU (Scholarship), she was a Visiting Lecturer at Manchester Business School from 2001-2004 teaching an elective in business ethics to MBAs. In 2004, she started as Senior Lecturer at NTU.