Learning Activity - Sustainability and Ecosystems Services Pitch
Consider a scenario where you are an entrepreneur in a new solar energy technology startup. Your challenge is to integrate the principles of sustainability and environmental justice with your solar technology and generate a convincing pitch for your stakeholders.
Think about your course project proposal and identify the ecosystem services at your locale that need to be maintained, enhanced, or created and how you would address them in your business plan.
Here are some questions you may want to ask and answer:
- Why is it important to include ethics and sustainability strategy in solar project development?
- What is the short-term or long-term benefits in devising and implementing measures for maintaining ecosystem services at your site?
- Is there co-location of services in your project that benefit community at large?
- What will you do to ensure the resilience of land and nearby ecosystems through the project lifetime?
- Is there a merit in devising a progressive solar policy including the above aspects at the local, state, or federal level for projects like yours?
These questions become particularly important in formulating the core business philosophy for a specific firm. However, the context of the assignment here still needs to be couched within a real locale and for a well-defined client. (That is why I encourage you to tie it to your project proposal)
As a deliverable for this learning activity, you will need to create a 3-min video with your pitch to a potential client or stakeholder, specifically outlining the environmental benefits of your project design approach and share it on the Lesson 10 discussion forum in Canvas.
The style of the video is your preference – whatever works best for you personally. You can use a couple of slides, images, your own footage, or even show some data (if it helps) and narrate over it or you can just speak to the camera.
Because you need to keep it within 3-min limit and still to be informative, writing a script beforehand is highly helpful, but it is not required for submission.
Video creation options (choose one of these):
- Use Zoom to record your speech and save it to a cloud
- Use narrated Power Point slide show and save it as video (mp4)
- Use the “Record/Upload Media” button in the tool menu in the discussion thread in Canvas
- Record the video on your phone
If you are making video with your phone, it will need to be uploaded it to a video-sharing platform (e.g. YouTube or Google). You can designate it “unlisted” if you do not want to make it public. Then share a link or embed the video to your Canvas post.
Submitting your work
Please share the link to your video in your post on Lesson 10 Discussion Forum in Canvas. Please do not include your video as an attachment – in that case viewers will have to download the file to their computer to see it (and that is what we try to avoid). Wherever you share the video, be sure to set permissions so that anyone with the link could view it.
You will be graded on your ability to clearly convey the benefits of your ecosystem services plan to a broad audience. This activity is worth 20 points. Please see grading rubric in Canvas.