Are universities falling behind in the ‘green skills’ race?

There are major skills-related disruptions ahead for higher education, as the sector comes under governmental and labour market pressure to produce graduates – including micro-credential graduates – with the skills needed for a rapidly changing and ‘greening’ world, says Professor Patrick Paul Walsh, director of the United Nations SDG Academy.

The SDG Academy, whose content is produced in close collaboration with academia around the world, is one of many initiatives of the Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN) led by renowned Columbia University Economics Professor Jeffrey D Sachs.

More than 2,000 academic and research institutions across the world are members of the SDSN. Walsh has been there from the start in an oversight role but is now in operations as SDSN's vice-president of education, on secondment from his job as a professor of international development at University College Dublin.



Governments are talking about upskilling and reskilling the labour force. Ireland is one of many countries that is putting a lot of money into this, as is the European Union. “Everyone knows there’s skill mismatches,” Walsh said in an interview with University World News.

He urged higher education not to fall behind in the skills sphere, and instead to lead efforts to collaborate with technical and vocational education and training (TVET) as well as training providers within governments and the private sector to co-create, deliver and accredit the skills a transforming market is crying out for – especially for burgeoning ‘green’ jobs.

Coherence, co-creation and transdisciplinarity

“This is happening so fast, and it is something new for universities,” said Walsh. During the structural labour market disruptions of previous eras, such as in the United Kingdom in the 1980s, one governance response was to up skills training through public funding.

But today, public spending on education has declined and much more training takes place outside publicly funded higher education. In the global race towards sustainability skills for ‘green’ jobs, universities risk being left behind as other providers step up to fill the need.

“There should be more coherence and content co-creation between universities, TVET, and private and public sector trainers and a little bit of acceptance of prior learning or credit offset across different institutions and sectors,” Walsh argued.

“Why not partner to co-create curricula or at least allow accreditation of some of each other’s courses? That would be a quick fix. But there has to be pathways,” he said.

For example, there should not be dead-end microcredentials that deliver knowledge and skills but do not enable people to use them to progress, in a company, in professional accreditation or academically.

Dead-end microcredentials, Walsh remarked, are like “green washing”, where companies exaggerate their sustainability efforts while continuing with environmentally harmful practices.

Interestingly, he commented: “The first thing we think about with education for sustainable development (ESD) is the problem of interdisciplinarity.”

Universities are siloed in disciplines and they find it difficult to coordinate interdisciplinary work that is imperative to tackle sustainability challenges.

“I’m also talking about ‘transdisciplinary’ in the sense of how to bring knowledge into government, into corporates and into communities?” he said.

Universities work with these partners in numerous areas, said Walsh, but not to co-create curricula or for certification.

“We do not educate with our public, educational and corporate partners. We have to take this more seriously, particularly to mainstream environmental and social protection into the education and training curriculum,” he noted.

The Sustainable Development Solutions Network

Jeffrey Sachs was a special advisor to the former UN secretary general Ban-Ki Moon. During the 2012 UN Conference on Sustainable Development, known as Rio+20, countries got behind the idea of all countries working for sustainability in the four dimensions of sustainable development – environmental, economic, social and governance – when replacing the Millenium Development Goals project in 2015.

The outcome document of Rio+20 was called The Future We Want and among other things it introduced the concept of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

“There followed one of the biggest consultative processes the UN had ever done across stakeholders, government and non-governmental entities,” said Walsh.

It was decided that advancing the SDGs needed academic oversight. SDSN was born as a mandate under Ban-Ki Moon to leverage the intellectual force of universities to promote practical solutions to sustainability challenges. It helped to develop the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, which was adopted by the UN in 2015.

At the beginning, the SDSN was an initiative of the UN secretary general. It transmogrified into a think-tank that is independently funded because the SDSN is a network of academics who want academic freedom.

Its aim is for academics to take the lead in forging partnerships and linking people and organisations to implement the SDG agenda at all levels of governance.

Walsh sees this as somewhat perverse. “Universities and academics are bossed by governments, by NGOs, by corporates. The whole world is telling us what to do. It hasn’t been good,” he said.

Still, universities can be neutral, trusted partners bringing together the private sector, civil society and governments to support the SDGs and the sustainability transformations the world needs.

The Sustainable Development Solutions Network has been highly successful in leveraging university knowledge. By 2022, it had more than 2,000 member institutions, mostly universities, coordinated by 57 national and regional networks across 144 countries, with offices in New York, Paris, and Kuala Lumpur.

An important development that came out of the Pact for the Future – the new blueprint for tackling global challenges and the SDGs, which was adopted by the UN General Assembly in September 2024 – was that the UN High Level Political Forum will draft the post-2030 sustainable development agenda, which will go before the General Assembly in 2027.

This is good news, said Walsh: “It’s a signal that the SDGs will survive.” The SDSN academic network will be deeply involved in helping to draft the post-2030 sustainability agenda.

The work of the SDSN is multi-faceted. Among its many activities, as its name implies, the SDSN secretariat organises networks. It works in the realm of data, for instance producing the World Happiness Report along with Gallup and Oxford University.

SDGs Today was launched in 2020 to promote the use of timely and geospatial data for the SDGs. And the SDSN produces the SDG Dashboard, which ranks countries by SDG achievement and is part of the annual UN Sustainable Development Report.

The SDG Academy

The SDG Academy – the education and training division of the SDSN – was founded in 2014. Its mandate is to promote transformative education by creating and curating quality content on sustainable development, to share innovative pedagogies and training models, and to provide open access learning resources to a global audience. It offers an array of programming and a large repository of knowledge.

“The SDG Academy hit a million learners a few months ago. There’s eight billion people though, so we must reach more. We’re starting to mobilise, seeing how we could put our content into libraries for free,” said Walsh.

“We’re getting into what I call mobilisation of content into partner use, and we’re also getting into advocacy.

“We realised we weren’t shouting enough in UN meetings, to say ‘well, you might have ambition and money and data and plans to do transformation, but if you haven’t trained the people, you haven't got the professional staff to do this, you’ve got a big problem’,” he added.

One challenge with the UN system at large is that, rather like universities, it has silos. A UN platform called SDG Learn was launched in 2019, delivering curated knowledge and free courses on sustainability topics.

The SDG Academy is involved. “We’re targeting the UN system at large. If you look at our courses, they’re very much at the science-policy-practise interface. You have the science, but it’s about UN policy, and examples and practise, which is a little unusual,” said Walsh.

Today, SDG Learn has around 50 sustainability-related courses among its content and brings together some 160 MOOCs from different organisations. “They’re always getting the scientific view, always getting the policy framework exactly right, always talking to practise."

At the SDG Academy, over time the production of content such as MOOCs has become easier thanks to new technologies. What has not changed is the input of academia, in consultation with communities and the policy sphere.

Under a Global Classroom initiative, there are some 30 universities around the world that share a core module on their masters. Across the four dimensions of sustainable development, top scientists and policy and practise people have been invited to participate.

People compete over the questions, “then we flip them into our own classroom and do homework and debate”, he noted.

The context – Structural change in the labour force

Walsh is an industrial economist. “There have been episodes of structural change in the labour force, where products and services transform and many incumbent companies have gone bust.

“There’s been the birth and expansion of products and services and companies in new areas, with new skills required,” he said. At such times, people are concerned about skill structures.

If skills are not mobile across sectors or regions or even countries, there is a problem and structural unemployment can occur, Walsh explained. Such as after the collapse of the Soviet Union, with a sudden transition to a market system, and from state to private employment.

Walsh believes structural upheaval is happening now.

Facing global climate and other challenges, governments will increasingly need to regulate and put conditions on the market, for instance clamping down on companies exploiting nature or society to make money and obliging them to conform with environment, social and governance demands. The European Union is a good example.

At the same time, companies are beginning to realise the high business costs of climate change, such as flooding or disrupted supply chains. “They’re realising it would be a better world if we could stay within planetary boundaries and have social protection,” said Walsh.

“There’s going to be a massive disruption to the nature of companies, products and services, and the skill sets that people want. Equivalent to what we saw with trade liberalisation."

Some quick fixes, some challenges

Universities need to pull their weight in helping to ensure that governments and corporations become more ‘green’, inclusive and coordinated. At the national level, there must be coherence between training in government, professional training and accreditation in industry, and training in vocational colleges and in universities.

“What you can’t have is training with different skills, misaligned across sectors. The labour force will work when all training is rowing in the same direction, said Walsh. “We can’t afford periods of mismatch."

The slow pace of change in universities is a challenge. The SDSN is currently collaborating with UNIDO and UNITAR to develop a Capabilities 4 the Future hub, which offers a place for government agencies, private sector and educational and training institutions to build capacity and skills for businesses aimed at advancing sustainable industrial development.

But universities must do more to deliver the ‘green skills’ needed for ‘green’ development. “One type of quick fix is to say, well, why wouldn’t we partner with companies, professional bodies and associations who have training, and TVET colleges. Why wouldn’t universities want to incorporate more practical courses?

“It’s all about learning and practise. Why would you not be open to this type of [practical] content, such as from TVET colleges, being accredited inside the university? You can put up warning signs about content that is external to the university. But it’s worth doing if the workforce needs it,” said Walsh.

That is why the SDG Academy is talking about micro-credentials and ‘master pathways’ programmes that help learners to train for academic or professional goals. At the other end of the qualifications scale, it is also working with universities around the world towards an online master’s in science and sustainable development.

University College Dublin is delivering online education in sustainability, including a micro-credential course on EdX that is worth 10 credits. It can be used for a professional diploma that can be taken via alternative access routes that include working experience and prior learning.

“Would you be prepared, as University College Dublin has done with professional diplomas, to recognise 10% of professional learning from a government body or a professional accreditation body or a VET college?

“Would you not give 10 credits, 20 credits, where you’d recognise that learning and build it into your degree?” said Walsh.

There can be academic snobbery around lecturer qualifications outside the higher education sector, or their courses not going through university senates.

“But the point is that this can be important and enriching to students. Instead of internships, students could go out into alternative training that is more practice-orientated or more policy-orientated or more corporate-orientated, and get that training counted as part of their degree,” he explained.

There is an amazing amount of work being done on sustainability in universities around the world, in terms of delivery sustainability courses, embedding sustainability in curricula, and holding governments accountable for sustainability policies and actions.

But there are challenges. Universities are microcosms of the real world.

As Walsh pointed out: “On the one side of campus they’re doing recycling and on the other side there’s a big car park. There’s one set of people teaching sustainability and another teaching the status quo. That’s also reflected in governance and planning. So sustainability in universities is bipolar in a sense.”

But time is running out. Universities need to do more in order to contribute comprehensively to sustainability training for a more sustainable world – and quickly.

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