As green jobs demand rises, (some) universities make changes

The Asian Development Bank estimated in 2023 that about 43% of the workforce in the Asia and the Pacific region are vulnerable to changes imposed by climate change, warning that the transition to a low-carbon economy requires people to be trained in ‘green job’ skills and that higher education systems need to prepare to meet the new skills need.

The definition of green jobs, according to the International Labour Organization, is two-fold. First, it is the provision of direct employment in economic sectors and activities that helps reduce their negative environmental impacts. Second, it needs to come with adequate wages, safe working conditions and respect for worker rights.

A report published by the United Nations Environment Programme in 2021 on Global Guidance for Education on Green Jobs provided some key actions for educators to prepare students to participate in the green economy of the future.

Among these actions is the inclusion of environmental sustainability and learning outcomes related to growing an inclusive green workforce and economy across major curricula; and equipping educators, trainers and other staff with the ability to teach students the competencies and skills required for green jobs.



Incentives for change

Most universities in the Asian region, especially public ones, have been slow to change their curricula because of bureaucratic hurdles. However, with the new QS Sustainability University Rankings as a spur, many universities in the region are now keen to climb up the ranking ladder with Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) criteria being introduced to their curricula and university environments.

Singapore, the Philippines, India and Thailand are some of the countries that are taking this seriously by revising their curricula and changing the nature of academic learning.

Professor Prayook Srivilai, president of Mahasarakham University in north-eastern Thailand, which has over 42,000 students and about 2,200 curricula, told University World News in an interview that “integrating SDGs into ranking criteria will incentivise institutions to prioritise sustainability in their teaching, research and community engagement activities”.

Through a digitally driven “smart cities solutions” programme, his university works with local municipalities to create greener cities and address vulnerabilities to natural disasters.

Dr Sarana Photchanachan, dean of the faculty of management at Shinawatra University in Thailand, said the institution has set new policy for a green university whereby each department, through its teaching and in its curriculum, offers “activities that enable students to understand the SDGs and be aware of the importance of a green economy”.

The SDGs serve as key drivers for the transition from theoretical teaching to more practical and interdisciplinary approaches, says Political Science and Development Studies Professor Francisco Magno of De La Salle University in the Philippines.

Speaking to University World News, he described this as a trend gathering momentum across universities in Asia.

“They are integrating sustainability into the curriculum, and encouraging experiential learning, and partnering with industries [and] this approach helps equip students with the skills and knowledge needed for the green economy.”

India’s National Education Policy

A consultancy report unveiled last year by the Indian Skill Council for Green Jobs predicted that India has the potential to create 35 million green jobs by 2047. However, to achieve that the education system has to play a major role in ‘greening’ the curriculum to produce these workers.

India’s National Education Policy (NEP) unveiled in 2020 emphasises the importance of sustainability education in achieving India’s SDG ambitions.

But Professor Biplab Loho-Choudhury, country director (India) of the Asian Congress for Media and Communication, from Visva Bharati in Santiniketan, told University World News that the NEP’s ambitions call for a whole mindset change and an acknowledgement that development cannot be at the cost of other sectors like the ecosystem. This change in mindset in the higher education sphere will “take time to sprout”, he argued.

“NEP 2020 is preparing for the gradual introduction of a holistic approach so that an entrepreneurial young population would be able to identify problems within the community and country at the local and regional levels to offer solutions in an organised manner,” said Loho-Choudhury.

Singapore hub ambitions

In the small city state of Singapore, which is a concrete jungle but a digital technology powerhouse, greening the environment is taken seriously – perhaps with the ambition of making the country a regional hub for green jobs-related education.

With Southeast Asia estimated to have about 30 million sustainability-linked jobs by 2030, the state is pushing ahead with the Singapore Green Plan 2030 that includes an increase in carbon tax for business and the training of people for green jobs.

Educational institutions, such as Singapore Institute of Technology (SIT), are increasingly integrating sustainability principles into their curricula, utilising experiential learning and digital platforms, and collaborating with institutions and businesses to develop practical training programmes. Baseline sustainability education is compulsory for all undergraduates at SIT and in joint degree programmes.

“Sustainable development education and training should not only be about the teaching of theories and case examples. It should also cover the application aspects,” argued Associate Professor Ethan Chong, head of sustainability for education and research, in a recent article published on the SIT website.

From this year, Singapore Management University will require all incoming undergraduates to attain intermediate mastery of sustainability before graduation by completing at least one course in the field. The university’s provost, Timothy Clark, told the Straits Times in February that this is part of an effort to prepare students for future green jobs that may not exist at the moment.

Grappling with definitions

Governments in Asia are still mulling the idea of how to define green jobs and focus their education strategies on that. The Asian Development Bank report indicated that national green taxonomies have been emerging in the region. They include Sri Lanka Central Bank’s Sri Lanka Green Finance Taxonomy (2022) and Bangladesh’s Sustainable Finance Policy for Banks and Financial Institutions (2022).

“We hear regularly that a defining feature of the future job market is the impact of technological advancements, like robotics and artificial intelligence. Yet, the impact of green growth imperatives is likely to be an equally profound feature of the future job market, and often attracts less focus in many developing countries,” said economist Anushka Wijesinha, director of the Centre for a Smart Future in Sri Lanka.

His centre has interviewed 15 companies involved in the environment management field such as water treatment, electric vehicles and solar energy, and found that the companies were looking primarily for engineering graduates with environmental engineering know-how, but such graduates were hard to find in Sri Lanka.

Sri Lanka launched a Climate Prosperity Plan on the sidelines of COP27 in 2022 that estimates the creation of a minimum of 242,000 green jobs by 2030. But Wijesinha said there is a lack of clarity about what green jobs are and what skills are involved.

“A review of programmes offered by 33 technical and vocational education and training institutions across Sri Lanka show only a very limited number of courses available in the green jobs space,” he noted.

Professor Daham Jayawardana of the department of forestry and environmental science of Sri Jayewardenepura University told University World News there is no sustainability-related course content in the department because these need approvals from the faculty board and senate.

At his Centre for Sustainability “most of the sustainability-related activities are run under the budget given by external finance”, he said. “We are signing MoUs [memorandums of understanding] with industries for the relevant sustainability-related activities.” However, he added that, “through the present curricula [for] industrial training, certificate short courses and special seminars”, they are training students as human resources for sustainability projects.

Top-down in Bangladesh

In 2023 the World Bank recommended that Bangladesh needed to reorient its higher education training and research more intensively towards a green economy. But Professor Shameem Reza of the department of mass communication and journalism at the University of Dhaka told University World News that the World Bank recommendations have not been amply communicated to the teaching faculty and researchers at public universities.

“There is an informal consensus in the university domains to reorient its training, curricula and research towards a green economy, but in the current policy approaches I do not see any such reflections,” said Reza, who sees the World Bank’s top-down approach to working with universities as a problem.

“Some media and communication departments are trying to incorporate green development issues in teaching development communication, but this is happening in isolation. There is no coherent or organised effort to do this systematically as a well-planned and achievable goal.”

While universities are likely to offer more short-term certificate courses to stay relevant in training for the green economy, Magno of De La Salle University in the Philippines argued that an interdisciplinary approach to teaching sustainable development can be more effective at the postgraduate level.

“Postgraduate students often have foundational knowledge in their fields, allowing for deeper integration of complex topics like sustainability, governance and development,” he noted. “They are also better positioned for specialised research, as well as collaboration across disciplines, which aligns well with the multifaceted nature of sustainable development challenges.”