MOOC on Business Model Innovation for Sustainable Landscape Restoration

14 February 2019
Woodland restoration in Iceland
Woodland restoration in Iceland

UNU-LRT has created a massive open online course (MOOC) on Business Model Innovation for Sustainable Landscape Restoration, with its partners in the ENABLE consortium. The course is open for all and free of charge. This is the second MOOC co-created by UNU-LRT and the ENABLE consortium members. It builds upon ENABLE’s first MOOC, which offered comprehensive knowledge of landscape degradation and restoration from the perspectives of natural sciences, economics and business administration. This new MOOC is inter- and transdisciplinary, designed for environmental- and business students and professionals, as well as anyone with an interest in landscape restoration based on sustainable business models. The course addresses the challenges of large-scale landscape restoration with a partnership approach and reflects the interconnectedness of nature, society and economy in landscape management.

This eight-week free online course aims to equip learners with practical business tools to restore landscapes. In the course, participants are encouraged to go through the business model innovation process in groups of their choice, based on a common interest. The course is designed in three phases that move the participants from ideas towards the successful implementation of a new business model for sustainable landscape restoration based on four different returns: return of natural and social capital, return of inspiration and return of financial capital. Each step of the process is illustrated with three real-life cases of landscape restoration to show how the theory looks in practice. These cases are: a large-scale woodland restoration case in Iceland, a case about diversification of land use and cropping systems in Spain; and a case about the challenges of recovering from forest fires in Portugal.

The course is now open for learners to start working on solutions for landscape restoration – one of the biggest challenge of our time. For more information, watch the teaser video and see the ENABLE website. You can register for the course here.

ENABLE is a strategic partnership, co-funded by the Erasmus+ programme of the European Union. Its consortium partners are: Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University; Commonland; The Spanish National Research Council Soil and Water Conservation Research Group; Nova School of Business and Economics; and the United Nations University Land Restoration Training Programme.