Green Skills and Net Zero Education
The Green Skills and Net Zero Education collection presents summaries of research papers that explore how vocational training, educational institutions, and targeted programs can simultaneously address climate change challenges and social inequalities. The papers collectively examine various approaches to building sustainability competencies, from technical green job training to transformative capabilities that empower individuals to become agents of environmental and social change.
This article examines how teacher candidates from Western Kentucky University completed field experiences at the nation's first net zero school, a facility generating as much energy as it consumes through renewable sources.
This 2024 study examines how Denmark successfully integrated environmental skills into its vocational education system through a "polycentric governance" approach, where decision-making power is shared between multiple semi-autonomous groups rather than controlled centrally. The study demonstrates that successfully greening vocational education requires balancing stakeholder autonomy with coordinated support structures.
This chapter examines how reskilling African women for green jobs can simultaneously address gender inequality and climate change challenges.
This article examines the complex role of green skills in enabling sustainability transitions, revealing that effective implementation requires going far beyond basic technical training. Through a comprehensive literature review, the article shows that successful Green Skills programs must combine technical-operational abilities with interpersonal and intrapersonal competencies, while being carefully tailored to local contexts and institutional frameworks.
This article argues that current approaches to green skills development are too narrowly focused on STEM and technical capabilities. It presents a comprehensive framework comprising three interconnected types of green skills: specific technical skills for green jobs, cross-cutting green life skills for sustainable behavior, and transformative skills for systemic change.
This influential article by McGrath and Powell challenges the dominant "green skills" approach to vocational education and training (VET), arguing that simply training people for green jobs is insufficient for achieving true sustainability. Instead of focusing narrowly on economic growth and employability, they propose that VET must be fundamentally reimagined to support both human development and environmental sustainability.