Engineering the way out of global sustainability crises

‘Green skills’ are the same skills that are required in many people’s day-to-day work and are offered by universities across many disciplines. But they are rarely taught in engineering, a profession that is crucial to achieving sustainable development.

Engineering for One Planet tackles this problem with a curriculum framework and guides for lecturers on integrating sustainability into engineering.

As economies and societies respond to escalating climate change and other sustainability-related crises, there are rapidly rising numbers of ‘green’ jobs and jobs that are ‘greening’. However, there is also a growing gap between the demand for and supply of ‘green skills’.

So there has been no concomitant rapid rise in graduates who are appropriately skilled for ‘green’ jobs, many of which require not only high-level technical skills but also interdisciplinary skills that help people to combine knowledge from different disciplines to solve problems.



Seven years ago The Lemelson Foundation in the United States realised the need to transform engineering education. Engineering students receiving startup support from Lemelson grantees were often not taking into consideration the full sustainability impacts of their innovations; instead they were offering purely technical solutions.

“Often students had amazing inventions that could change the world but were not designed for systems sustainability, in the sense of thinking through all the potential aspects of their creations and business models,” said Cindy Cooper, a senior programme officer at Lemelson.

Cooper is also co-creator of Engineering for One Planet (EOP) along with researcher and consultant Cindy Anderson, Lemelson’s grantee partner VentureWell, and researcher Dr Jeremy Faludi.

Educating engineers who possess the full range of skills to protect the planet will also boost their agency to do so, she told University World News.

“I believe, and this is backed up in social science research, that agency is the antidote to despair. The challenges we face can be daunting, even paralysing.

“Social and environmental sustainability competencies are critical to protecting our planet and our lives, and also to providing young people with real skills. And the ability to make a difference is critical to their sense of agency and to building resilience in our social fabric,” said Cooper.

‘Green skills’, ‘green’ jobs and ‘greening’ jobs

There has been 8% annual growth in green jobs globally over the past five years, according to the World Economic Forum, citing LinkedIn research.

With ‘green talent’ growing by 6% a year, there is an expanding sustainability skills gap. LinkedIn’s 2024 Global Climate Talent Stocktake suggests that the gap could reach 18.7% by 2030 and more than double by 2050.

It is difficult to nail down up-to-date figures for engineering but, for instance, last year labour analytics firm Lightcast in the United Kingdom reported a rising number of ‘green’ engineering jobs.

In the past five years years postings for these jobs had increased by 55% and postings requiring ‘green skills’ by 48%, as reported by EngineeringUK.

Debra Rowe, president of the US Partnership for Education for Sustainable Development and an international expert on education for sustainable development, has described green jobs as meaning three things – jobs for the green transition-technical, jobs that have not yet been invented, and the greening of all jobs.

Cooper believes there is power in the idea that all jobs need to be green jobs, including in engineering. By not being mindful of the sustainability aspects of their technical work – even work designed to address sustainability problems – “engineers risk perpetuating new problems as they solve today’s problem”.

She would also like to see companies more involved in promoting the need for graduates with sustainability skills, “because the green skills gap isn’t going to close itself”.

If higher education ensures that graduating engineers have sustainability skills, companies could focus on upskilling current engineers – which universities could also help with.

How Engineering for One Planet came about

With the encouragement of The Lemelson Foundation’s executive director at the time, Carol Dahl, Cooper and Anderson started working together in 2017 on what was to become EOP. Founded by one of America’s most prolific independent inventors, Jerry Lemelson, its mission is improving lives through invention.

Previously, Cooper co-founded and led Portland State University’s Impact Entrepreneurs programme, where she taught social innovation and entrepreneurship, and co-created America’s first online academic and professional certificate in social innovation and entrepreneurship.

Anderson has a sustainability consultancy, Alula Consulting, and was formerly a university wildlife researcher who studied the impacts of climate change on seabirds in polar environments, and launched the world’s first online, multidisciplinary masters programme in sustainable design at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design.

Said Cooper: “Engineering products and infrastructure affect everything in our world profoundly. You would think that a sustainability mindset and skills would have been baked into education by now, but they aren’t. We could see a real gap.”

At first the foundation tried to plug this gap through grants to produce educational tools and interventions – such as an ‘Inventing Green Toolkits’ co-developed by Anderson and VentureWell. In 2017, The Lemelson Foundation hired Anderson and Faludi to explore this issue further for two years.

“We started to see that sustainability could become a core tenet of the engineering profession, not a separate add-on but just how it is done. That led to a strategy and a theory of change, always in consultation with stakeholders – a community representing the engineering industry and academia, and the public sector and non-profit sectors,” Cooper added.

The Engineering for One Planet Framework was co-developed along with hundreds of experts and people from diverse experiences, geographies and sectors.

“It is important to underscore that EOP is about collaborative co-creation,” Anderson told University World News. EOP resources are not created in a bubble.

“We try to capture all the various perspectives, voices and ideas across all stakeholder groups. We have received hundreds of comments to improve EOP resources,” she noted.

The EOP Framework

Development of the EOP Framework has taken place in four phases. First was research during 2017 and 2018. Second, during 2019 and 2020, a strategy and the first draft of the EOP Framework were developed with stakeholders and experts.

Third, from 2020 to 2022 there was the launch of the EOP Framework 1.0, pilot testing and input from a strategic advisory group. Fourth, from 2022 to now has been a growth period, including launching the EOP Framework 2.0 and new teaching guides, mini-grants and institutionalisation grants for implementing the framework, an EOP Network, and an award.

The EOP Framework offers academics a menu of competencies aligned to the accreditation standards of ABET, the global accreditation agency in the STEM fields. Said Anderson: “Educators can bring sustainability into engineering education and also know that they are achieving ABET student outcomes.”

The EOP strategy has interrelated approaches, each involving working with stakeholders.

The first approach involves co-created and community-tested and used resources, including the EOP Framework and companion teaching guides, which were produced after the EOP community asked: “What do we need to teach and, soon after, how do we teach this?” Anderson told University World News.

“The second approach is through grantmaking, funding and supporting faculty efforts,” she said.

The original EOP pilot grantees were five universities of different sizes and from different regions across the United States: Arizona State University, Oregon State University, the University of Central Florida, the University of Maryland and Villanova University.

Currently there are three funded programmes that are helping to scale up delivery of the EOP Framework at a national level, involving the American Society for Engineering Education as well as ABET, The Lemelson Foundation and the National Science Foundation.

The third approach is for EOP to support the collaborative efforts of its community through the EOP Network, which has around 100 active volunteer members who work to advance the EOP initiative.

“That could be curriculum change or creating coursework for anybody to use, or building relationships with professional societies,” Anderson noted.

“Right now there’s a team working on a guide to prepare students to get engineering jobs in which they can bring sustainability to the fore. EOP is not one small project, it is multi-pronged and complex. There are now thousands of people standing beside us in this effort,” she explained.

The EOP Framework structure

The EOP Framework has nine topic areas – systems thinking; environmental literacy; responsible business and economy; social responsibility; environmental impact assessment; materials selection; design; critical thinking; and communication and teamwork.

The framework is represented by a wheel with ‘systems thinking’ at the centre and the other eight topic areas the spokes. “One of the points most agreed upon within our community was that systems thinking was critical for engineers to understand and should be central,” said Anderson.

Spread across the nine topic areas are 93 core and advanced learning outcomes, all mapped against the student outcomes of ABET. The framework also is mapped against Sustainable Development Goal 12, on responsible production and consumption, and against Bloom’s Taxonomy of Educational Objectives.

Other organisations are creating complementary tool kits.

For example, the EOP Framework is mapped to the standards of AHEP4 – Accreditation of Higher Education Standards Programmes – of the Engineering Council in the UK.

Also in the UK is an Engineering Ethics Toolkit from the Engineering Professors Council, and Engineers Without Borders UK’s Global Responsibility Competency Compass for practitioners and Reimagined Degree Map for engineering departments.

At the core of the framework is systems thinking. Anderson gave an example of building a bridge.

“Systems thinking requires an engineer to move up a level to think about the whole system involved in building a bridge – the infrastructure, transportation, production, mining, impacts on the local environment and community of the bridge’s location and so on,” she said.

“This is of critical importance, not only because there’s a green jobs gap but also because of where we are with the planet,” she noted. Engineers graduating without these skills and knowledge and mindsets are being set up to fail, Anderson argued: “Every job is a ‘green’ job.”

Last year the EOP Framework companion teaching guides were released, to provide practical examples of what educators can do in the classroom. “Everything is available for free online. This is to lower the barrier to entry for anybody interested in doing this work,” she said.

So what are green skills?”

Cooper and Anderson arrived at the framework’s range of skills in consultation with many people in the ‘real world’, industry and sustainability experts in particular.

Teamwork, leadership, communication and critical thinking emerged clearly as skills that were needed, for example – skills taught across many other disciplines.

“In particular we would hear about how, if an engineer is trying to foster more sustainable practises or promote an approach that is different to the past, they need to be able to speak the language of business, to be compelling, to work with people from other disciplines effectively so as to collaborate on and justify different ways of doing,” Cooper said.

“Social and environmental sustainability are changing so quickly, and climate change is forcing continuous learning around these topics. These are living documents,” she explained.

The EOP Framework has been revised once, added Cooper. “In 2025 there will be a full revision process again, through talking to people who have been using the framework, talking to industry and climate and sustainability experts, and looking at what’s happening in the world,” she noted.

Interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity

It is widely agreed that interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity are important to education for sustainable development (ESD). Over and above the technical skills required for all engineering fields, many sustainability-related skills for green jobs are from across disciplines.

“For us, interdisciplinarity is fundamental,” Anderson said. In a greening world, the ‘independent engineer’ is an illusion: “We know that none of the massive sustainability challenges we face can be solved in isolation.

“We’re helping universities, especially through grant programmes, to think about how they are integrating these topic areas into existing courses rather than stand-alone courses. We’re not talking about something separate and siloed, it’s all integrated into what already exists, ideally,” she explained.

Cooper continued: “The interdisciplinary need is great, but universities weren’t built that way.” While a lot of universities are now fostering more connections across disciplines, “sometimes they are just trying to make connections within engineering. Universities need to break the silos”, she explained.

The EOP Framework can itself be used by other disciplines. “People can adapt and adopt them. The menu applies to all kinds of situations,” said Cooper.

The case of the University of Maryland

Interdisciplinarity was core to the University of Maryland’s approach to the EOP Framework, during the first pilot.

Elisabeth Smela, professor of mechanical engineering in the A James Clark School of Engineering, is working with a core group of faculty to better integrate sustainability throughout the undergraduate engineering curriculum.

Under the initial EOP grant, said Smela: “one requirement of the grant was to reach out across campus and determine who our allies were. We had started that already and had developed a good rapport with the Center for Social Value Creation at the business school.

“We found that there are many departments around the university that are involved in various sustainability efforts. The university also has a sustainability minor. Bringing this all together into one concerted effort, however, is challenging”.

During the pilot, she told University World News: “we realised that while we were able to affect our own courses, courses taught by other faculty were going to be more challenging because of two things: one, faculty don’t know that much about sustainability; and two, faculty don’t have access to applicable materials. There’s not that many examples”.

So a four-day ‘train the trainers’ workshop was designed and held. Now an online version is being developed.

Villanova University has been a leader in developing EOP materials to train faculty, and Smela attended one of their workshops, which she found inspiring. “So now our goals have expanded, from integrating sustainability throughout our own departments to, well, all faculty on campus.

“Academics need to be comfortable with sustainability concepts before venturing into teaching them, and to know what materials are available to them,” Smela said.

“Along with everybody else in the Engineering for One Planet effort, we’re trying to figure out how we can bring together examples so that newcomers can say, oh, okay, I can adapt that for my course,” she noted.

For students, one of the possibilities to deliver ESD to undergraduates is through minor courses. But the thinking must be creative because the administration to set up a minor takes years.

A Science, Technology and Society programme is creating a sustainability track in their minor, for instance.

“This would mean students get credit for taking courses on sustainability. Likewise, creating an engineering track within the campus minor on sustainability would allow us to reach more students,” Smela said.

The case of Villanova University

Villanova University, another one of the first five pilot institutions, used the EOP Framework in engineering and then adapted it across several disciplines.

As part of the pilot, Villanova designed and delivered a week-long faculty development workshop that introduced the core tenets of the EOP Framework and provided lecturers with background knowledge on systems thinking, environmental and sustainability literacy, responsible business, and social responsibility.

Bridget Wadzuk, Edward A Daylor Chair in Civil Engineering, and William Lorenz, professor of the practice, told University World News that from this foundational knowledge, lecturers were able to think about how to apply some of the concepts “and how they could make slight changes to their syllabus to bring sustainability into their courses”.

Lorenz was Villanova’s founding director of Sustainable Engineering, and Wadzuk is the current director.

The programme was offered in 2021 and 2022, and a great deal was learned. “As faculty went through the training, the College of Engineering was able to add more courses that had sustainability attributes across the different majors and years,” said Wadzuk and Lorenz.

A subsequent Lemelson grant enabled the workshop to be updated and continued for Villanova academics, and to be offered to other institutions. The engineering school also explored how to institutionalise the EOP Framework into curricular programming.

In the updated workshop, lecturers are able to develop learning tools. “We offer many examples, so they can see a variety of different ways and techniques that can be used to make small adjustments to course content and delivery, to highlight the role of sustainability in a topic,” they noted.

Wadzuk, Lorenz and colleagues have begun to work with academics across the university. In May there was a workshop with engineering, business, nursing, arts and sciences.

“The non-engineering faculty reviewed the EOP Framework and identified the learning outcomes that seemed relevant regardless of discipline, and then took others and modified the language so that they were more widely applicable,” they said.

Villanova has a Pathways to an Ethos of Sustainable Living programme that involves personal, family and community groups, and also works with industry in various ways, for example through a Sustainable Enterprise Executive Education and Development programme.

Implementing and scaling up the framework

The five universities that piloted the EOP Framework were asked to change or modify one class using the tool, and provide feedback on what was learned. But they did much more than that.

“They collectively modified or created 61 courses that impacted nearly 6,000 students and 80 faculty. That just blew us away, in terms of the possibility of change happening quickly. From there we looked at how to build on the lessons learned,” said Cooper.

Today, the initiative “has more than 50 grantees or sub-grantees, more than 300 courses have been impacted, and 19,000 students reached through the curricular changes. That’s just our counting of things we’re funding,” she said.

With EOP Framework tools available for free online, and through hard work disseminating them in conferences, social media and sharing among educators, the impact is certainly much greater.

“What thrills us is going to conferences where people present on EOP. So, we know our tools are being taken up by others we have never met,” Cooper said.

The visibility of the EOP Framework is being dialled up with the launch this year of the ABET and Lemelson Foundation Engineering for One Planet (EOP) Innovation in Sustainability Award, with a US$10,000 cash prize.

It rewards people, programmes or institutional teams that demonstrate innovation in implementing sustainability topics into ABET-accredited courses.

The first winner is Dr Jennifer H Watt, director of sustainability education at the University of Utah and assistant professor in the school of environment, society and sustainability.

“The award recognises ground-breaking approaches to sustainability and it’s inspirational. People are proving there are ways to do this effectively. It doesn’t have to be daunting,” said Cooper.

The EOP Mini-Grants Programme supported by the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) launched in 2022, intending to provide 10 mini-grants to universities. More funding was added due to “enormous demand” – more than 100 applicants in the first year.

“Every year since there have been more applications, and they have gotten more ambitious and have become even more holistic and high quality. So we know there’s hunger among educators to have tools and mentoring to proceed with these kinds of changes,” Cooper noted.

Email Karen MacGregor: macgregor.karen@gmail.com.