CEDHE Forum: Innovating Environmental Science Education - wrap-up

Sustainability is predicated on the need to bring together environmental, social and economic systems. Understanding the interactions between these systems, namely how an action in one affects the other is an important skill, which decision makers and businesses need access to in order to support effective policy and practise. 

Interdisciplinarity and systems thinking is central to achieving a sustainable future and should be a key area of focus for education. Environmental science is fundamentally an interdisciplinary field. It brings together knowledge from geography, geology, biology, physics, and chemistry to understand the world around us. However, specialisation within the within the sector can lead to the development of siloed approaches to environmental challenges and the implementation of single factor solutions aimed at dealing with specific environmental concerns, rather than considering the wider systems within which they sit.

To develop solutions that can address multiple challenges in a holistic way, requires a good foundation in interdisciplinary working and understanding of systems, this needs to go beyond just environmental systems and into social and political sciences. 
Embedding sustainability across the curriculum and bridging gaps between disciplines will be an important part of equipping the next generation of environmental scientists with the necessary knowledge and skills and systems thinking and interdisciplinary work. 

Planetary Health education framework is focused on fusing theories, methodologies and expertise across disciplinary boundaries, with the aim to provide a basis for academics to work across disciplines and with other civic and non-academic partners to tackle those real-world challenges and support simultaneous improvements in human and environmental well-being. 

 

The Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) CoDesignS framework is another example of supporting interdisciplinarity and sustainability, providing support for all disciplines to embed ESD in curriculum design. 
Learning from approaches like this can support specialist scientists to collaborate across disciplines and apply their specialist knowledge to key challenges. 

 

It was noted that, embedding interdisciplinarity and systems thinking is not mutually exclusive with supporting disciplined specialists. Without disciplines, interdisciplinarity would not exist. Forging links across disciplines, enables knowledge exchange and ensures that specialists have a good grounding in these skills to ensure that their expertise has leveraged effectively. Alongside specialists, we need to support boundary spanners and knowledge brokers who can take on translation and connecting roles. 

Environmental scientists are being increasingly consulted to develop integrated solutions. To effectively fulfill this need, scientists need to be up-skilled in systems thinking principles and techniques which, requires specialist knowledge of Environmental systems and how they interact, as well as a broad understand understanding of the social and economic systems in which they operate. Managing this complexity will be a key requisite of future environmental scientists. In the face of multiple environmental crises, supporting that adaptive capacity and society will be vital. 

We need to provide Environmental Scientists with the support to become agents of change. Enabling skills by their nature are varied and will depend on the specifics of the work, but they include things like science communication skills, stakeholder engagement and innovation, critical thinking, leadership and collaboration. Foundational skills that can bridge gaps between stakeholders and specialisms. Enabling skills must go hand-in-hand with technical skills. 

There is a demand for graduates to display technical skills from across the sector; from 2022-23, job postings requiring green skills rose by more than 20%, and this growth indicates the increasing demand for technical skills associated with environmental scientists. There is an increase in demand for skills driven by challenge areas such as, regenerative agriculture, biodiversity net-gain and nature based solutions and the circular economy. 

To support the effective application of both technical and enabling skills, we also need digital skills. Technological innovation has revolutionised the way environmental scientists     collect, curate, analyse and visualise data on the environment and a key focus for environmental professionals will be focused on data collection, cleaning and analysis and integrating those data insights with real world assessment to feed into decision making. Evolving education systems is necessary to equip future professionals with the skills and the knowledge needed to succeed in careers. 

It would be impossible to discuss every technical skill needed, as they are so wide-ranging. To frame the discussion, we looked at Net-Zero skills and the key priority skills covered in the project to illustrate the skills mix. 
Technical skills; carbon accounting and reporting as an example, are an increasingly sought after skill with the rise in reporting requirements related to greenhouse gas emissions and sustainability more broadly. Wider carbon management skills are a priority to support organisations, not just in reporting their emissions, but actually in developing plans and strategies for reducing them and reaching their net-zero targets. And this means that they will need access to a wide range of related skills in energy, waste management, transport and supply chain management. And then related to that, of course is climate risk management. So skills related to climate adaptation and resilience. And then in terms of enabling things like climate communications, supporting policy development and implementation, and social science skills to support behaviour change, all of these things are going to be massively important for the net zero transition. This is of course not an exhaustive list, but as a way of highlighting some of those different some of the different mix needed. 

In the environment sector, many employers are facing skills and resource challenges, and if education is not adapted to the needs of society, the skills and resource gap is only likely to widen. We will need a concerted effort across stakeholders to meet this demand for skills. Education institutes and learning providers should make sure they are equipping learners with the skills and knowledge needed by employers, as well as focus on providing students with opportunities to explore the practical application of their knowledge on real world scenarios and provide opportunities to develop those underpinning enabling skills. And this will equip learners both with technical competency and the skills to drive change. 

Supporting diverse routes into the sector alongside lifelong learning opportunities should be a key focus for education, to support the skills needs alongside traditional education pathways. New technical pathways should be developed, and lifelong learning should be supported through comprehensive industry recognised training programmes and guidance which aligns with our updated competency frameworks.  

If we are going to fulfill the skills needs in the sector, we also need to ensure that the sector is attracting  diverse talent and is representative of the society that it serves. The need for addressed transition was a recurrent theme throughout the entire project. ED&I and environmental justice are core components and drivers of sustainability. Perceptions and knowledge of the sector can be a barrier to diversity. Showcasing the breadth of careers in the sector and the relevance of these careers to people from diverse backgrounds and their lives and, highlighting role models to create a sense of belonging are all important aspects of ED&I initiatives. Making traditional routes such as higher and further education in the sector more inclusive is essential, but it will not be enough to tackle the issues of diversity. These routes can have several in-built structural barriers. Therefore, it's important that as we break down these barriers, we also develop new routes. Technical pathways, apprenticeships and other opportunities such as paid internships, ring fenced opportunities for those from diverse backgrounds, sponsoring diverse talent, and creating networks to foster a sense of community need to be areas of focus. We should also champion the role of indigenous knowledge within this work. 
Education can play a key role in supporting this future by embedding principles of sustainability and systems thinking, supporting interdisciplinary knowledge exchange, and fostering skill sets aligned with solutions led science and providing that pipeline of knowledgeable, skilled and diverse environmental scientists.

 

Welcome
Professor Liz Price MBE, Chair of CEDHE 2020-2024, Deputy Pro-Vice-Chancellor Sustainability, Manchester Metropolitan University

 

Transforming the Planet: Our Vision for the Future of Environmental Science
Ethny Childs, Communities Lead, IES

 

Strengthening skills for sustainability
Gary Kass, Visiting Professor at the Centre for Environment and Sustainability, University of Surrey

 

Curriculum design and Education for Sustainable Development in Practice supported by the CoDesignS ESD Framework and Toolkit
Dr D. Theresa Nicholson, Reader (Higher Education and Pedagogy) Manchester Metropolitan University 

 

Climate Anxiety and Optimism provocation
IES Student Ambassadors

 

The Hope Wheel – a working model for constructively engaging with climate change in classrooms
Dr Bill Finnegan, Research Officer, Future of Education and Training for the Climate Education Lab, University of Oxford and Cathy d’Abreu, Senior Lecturer, Education for Sustainability, Oxford Brookes University

 

Communicating Environmental Science 
Jodie Bailey-Ho, Environmental Science Student at the University of Manchester, Department for Education Youth Focal Point for sustainability and climate change and co-founder of Teach the Teacher

 

How do students respond to ‘creative’ science communication assessments? Reflections from an undergraduate science communication module at the University of Plymouth
Dr Simon Dickinson, Lecturer in Geohazards and Risk, University of Plymouth and Faye Read, second year BSc Environmental Science Student