umanity’s efforts to reverse the impact of climate change depend on the environmental skills of Gen Z and Gen Alpha. This is the workforce that will provide the majority of skills to power green industries in a decarbonizing economy—the future leaders who will make the complex decisions required to manage the carbon transition equitably.
Around the world, we can see Gen Z speaking with a vocal and formidable political voice. It’s clear that this generation understands the challenges the world is facing because they are personally experiencing its crisis. These are the generations who will disproportionately bear the burden of climate change.
Those who are in positions of impact today—whether in education, business, or government—have a responsibility to do more to empower Gen Z and Gen Alpha with the necessary knowledge and skills to tackle climate change. To move the needle on sustainability, the younger generations need to build confidence in their ability to help, which involves a different kind of education model.
Build Sustainability Skills
To give young people the skills to save the planet, we must promote scientific and environmental literacy while nurturing skills like creativity and innovation; communication and collaboration. In combination, these skills are critical to ideate and scale better answers to the interconnected challenges of climate change and social inequality.
Importantly, their delivery does not have to come through traditional education systems. For example, through the EY Ripples program, EY and Microsoft are collaborating to help young people participate in the green economy. The Green Skills Passport, which offers free, self-paced online learning to support the next-generation workforce to gain sustainability skills and employment in the green economy, is hosted on the Microsoft Community Training platform and accessible via mobile and web in low-bandwidth areas. It is free to young people aged 16+ who are not engaged in education, employment, or training. Participants learn about sustainability and entrepreneurship and strengthen their employability skills through modules such as resume writing and interview preparation.
Offer Future-Focused Skills to All
As low-income countries seek to address learning poverty, the opportunity is not just to improve literacy rates but to offer a future-focused curriculum to give students the skills to succeed in the green economy and rise out of poverty. The key to delivering these skills equitably is to bypass traditional classrooms and harness digital platforms.
EY, through EY Ripples, has joined forces with education organizations, such as Teach for All, to design a Future Skills curriculum, covering topics not always taught in schools, such as environmental sustainability, emerging technology, civic literacy, financial literacy, and more. By inspiring students between the ages of 5 to 22 to explore these topics, the Future Skills modules aim to help young people unlock new passions, explore potential career paths, and develop the mindsets and skills needed for the future working world.
The program is offered in both synchronous (students and teachers in the same physical or virtual place) and asynchronous (self-paced learning) formats. For example, asynchronous text message-based courses are now available, distilling Future Skills Workshop modules on entrepreneurship into bite-size learning—provided via daily text messages. These text-based courses, which are accessible to anyone with a mobile phone, have already had 10,000 completions in eight countries.
Activate Sustainable Choices
Research suggests that, despite already having a strong foundation of sustainability knowledge, younger generations crave more engaging ways to receive sustainability-related content—as found by a global EY and JA Worldwide survey. Younger generations are demanding greater environmental literacy from education systems. According to the survey, young people are hungry for information on how to reduce their carbon footprint. Their big ask is for content to be more interactive and engaging, citing workshops and hands-on activities as key missing elements from their current sustainability education.
The findings suggest important opportunities for corporations and nonprofits to support educators and governments in elevating the environmental literacy of younger generations:
- Hosting expanded learning opportunities to share sustainability solutions from all the countries and regions within their network, sponsoring engaging workshops and hands-on activities.
- Providing educators with the tools to share additional context with students to help them better grasp the information they are getting from other sources, including social media.
- Strengthening ties with groups in local communities that can complement classroom learning with real-world experience to address the desire for more workshops and relevant hands-on training.
- Working with governments to promote sustainability education and environmental action through creating new initiatives and communicating better on existing sustainability programs.
Today’s younger generations are the driving force toward achieving a more sustainable future, yet they are looking to businesses and the public sector to act as catalysts for change. Corporations, educators, and governments must prioritize sustainability and environmental literacy to prepare the next-generation workforce to tackle the climate crisis.
The views reflected in this article are the views of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the global EY organization or its member firms.
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How to Assist the Next Generation of Leaders in Sustainability
Photo via Adobe Stock.
September 21, 2023
Young people will be key to reversing the impact of climate change in the future, so today we must equip them with the skills they'll need. Promoting scientific and environmental literacy and skills like creativity, innovation, communication, and collaboration is how we begin, writes Gillian Hinde.
H
umanity’s efforts to reverse the impact of climate change depend on the environmental skills of Gen Z and Gen Alpha. This is the workforce that will provide the majority of skills to power green industries in a decarbonizing economy—the future leaders who will make the complex decisions required to manage the carbon transition equitably.
Around the world, we can see Gen Z speaking with a vocal and formidable political voice. It’s clear that this generation understands the challenges the world is facing because they are personally experiencing its crisis. These are the generations who will disproportionately bear the burden of climate change.
Those who are in positions of impact today—whether in education, business, or government—have a responsibility to do more to empower Gen Z and Gen Alpha with the necessary knowledge and skills to tackle climate change. To move the needle on sustainability, the younger generations need to build confidence in their ability to help, which involves a different kind of education model.
Build Sustainability Skills
To give young people the skills to save the planet, we must promote scientific and environmental literacy while nurturing skills like creativity and innovation; communication and collaboration. In combination, these skills are critical to ideate and scale better answers to the interconnected challenges of climate change and social inequality.
Importantly, their delivery does not have to come through traditional education systems. For example, through the EY Ripples program, EY and Microsoft are collaborating to help young people participate in the green economy. The Green Skills Passport, which offers free, self-paced online learning to support the next-generation workforce to gain sustainability skills and employment in the green economy, is hosted on the Microsoft Community Training platform and accessible via mobile and web in low-bandwidth areas. It is free to young people aged 16+ who are not engaged in education, employment, or training. Participants learn about sustainability and entrepreneurship and strengthen their employability skills through modules such as resume writing and interview preparation.
Offer Future-Focused Skills to All
As low-income countries seek to address learning poverty, the opportunity is not just to improve literacy rates but to offer a future-focused curriculum to give students the skills to succeed in the green economy and rise out of poverty. The key to delivering these skills equitably is to bypass traditional classrooms and harness digital platforms.
EY, through EY Ripples, has joined forces with education organizations, such as Teach for All, to design a Future Skills curriculum, covering topics not always taught in schools, such as environmental sustainability, emerging technology, civic literacy, financial literacy, and more. By inspiring students between the ages of 5 to 22 to explore these topics, the Future Skills modules aim to help young people unlock new passions, explore potential career paths, and develop the mindsets and skills needed for the future working world.
The program is offered in both synchronous (students and teachers in the same physical or virtual place) and asynchronous (self-paced learning) formats. For example, asynchronous text message-based courses are now available, distilling Future Skills Workshop modules on entrepreneurship into bite-size learning—provided via daily text messages. These text-based courses, which are accessible to anyone with a mobile phone, have already had 10,000 completions in eight countries.
Activate Sustainable Choices
Research suggests that, despite already having a strong foundation of sustainability knowledge, younger generations crave more engaging ways to receive sustainability-related content—as found by a global EY and JA Worldwide survey. Younger generations are demanding greater environmental literacy from education systems. According to the survey, young people are hungry for information on how to reduce their carbon footprint. Their big ask is for content to be more interactive and engaging, citing workshops and hands-on activities as key missing elements from their current sustainability education.
The findings suggest important opportunities for corporations and nonprofits to support educators and governments in elevating the environmental literacy of younger generations:
- Hosting expanded learning opportunities to share sustainability solutions from all the countries and regions within their network, sponsoring engaging workshops and hands-on activities.
- Providing educators with the tools to share additional context with students to help them better grasp the information they are getting from other sources, including social media.
- Strengthening ties with groups in local communities that can complement classroom learning with real-world experience to address the desire for more workshops and relevant hands-on training.
- Working with governments to promote sustainability education and environmental action through creating new initiatives and communicating better on existing sustainability programs.
Today’s younger generations are the driving force toward achieving a more sustainable future, yet they are looking to businesses and the public sector to act as catalysts for change. Corporations, educators, and governments must prioritize sustainability and environmental literacy to prepare the next-generation workforce to tackle the climate crisis.
The views reflected in this article are the views of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the global EY organization or its member firms.
