By Dorthe Kirkgaard Nielsen - for EPALE Denmark

The effects of the climate crisis are clear for everyone to see, and the need for a green transition is undeniable. But if we are to succeed in creating a greener and more sustainable world, we need green skills - not just for the workforce but for every individual citizen.

Adult learning plays a key role in enabling both highly educated, skilled and unskilled workers to master new green technologies and adopt a green mindset in their work. A role that is just as important when it comes to educating individuals to think green and to become global citizens who are aware of their impact on the environment.

The green transition is the biggest challenge of our time, but while politicians harp on about climate action plans, climate goals and green targets, there is little talk of how we get the workforce we need to achieve these goals. This is a big mistake, if you ask Lisbeth Knudsen, strategy director at Think Tank Monday Morning, which together with CONCITO - Denmark's green think tank - ran a two-year project entitled ”Fremtidens grønne arbejdsmarked” (The green labour market of the future).

Without a sufficient workforce with the right skills, the transition risks stalling, highlighting a clear need to step up the pace to train and retrain the existing workforce.

"Our project highlighted a major need for upskilling, so that employees in all types of industries adopt a greener mindset and greener solutions based on a knowledge that many currently don’t possess," says Lisbeth Knudsen.
 

Lisbeth Knudsen, strategy director at Think Tank Monday Morning.

Everyone needs to think green

According to Knudsen, securing enough workers to install wind turbines, building a green infrastructure or power-to-X plants isn’t enough. Equally important is that everyone in the job market adopts a green and responsible mindset.

Whether you're a lorry driver, electrician, economist, hairdresser, buyer, plumber, fitter, lawyer or unskilled worker, you need to think green. Electricians require skills in areas such as heat pumps and energy optimisation. Buyers need to think about material reuse, environmental footprint, green requirements in tenders and so forth. And carpenters need to know what it means to act sustainably, understand the materials they are using and be able to think and work in a circular way. They also need to be familiar with life cycle analysis, recycling and waste sorting.

"It's very much about everyone having a green mindset. When installing a new machine, thinking about the possible CO2 emissions, what waste the machine generates, power consumption and much more, should be automatic. No matter what job you do, you need to adopt a sustainable mindset, and if we don't invest heavily in adult education - in continuing and further education in this area - we won't be able to implement the green transition that everyone is talking about," says Knudsen. 

Need for a national action plan for education

The project “Fremtidens grønne arbejdsmarked” led to eight recommendations, several of which put the spotlight on continuing and further education.

"One of our recommendations is about having a national action plan in place for education and skills, because with the green transition's demand for everyone in the labour market to be upskilled to a greater or lesser extent, we need a clear perspective and more resources for both continuing and further education," says Knudsen.

Another recommendation is for "more and better continuing and further education and training". According to Knudsen, the project shows that the current public supply of continuing and further education is deficient, with far too little focus on the green transition. Equally, education is too slow to adapt, highlighting a lack of knowledge about green issues among teachers in adult education in both the VEU system and the AMU system.

"We also found a lack of flexibility in the education’s organisation. Companies don't want to send their employees on external courses, they want short courses that take place internally, and which are updated with the latest information, are practical and directly relevant to the company in question," says Knudsen.

In her opinion, the government needs to look at the supply of continuing and further education, and for employees and employers to jointly take up the challenge to educate themselves so that everyone is equipped to take part in the essential green transition.

She highlights that we don’t need 47 new green education programmes to boost the green transition. A greener mindset should be integrated into all education and training programmes, while continuing and further education requires a turbo boost. 

Green and digital skills go hand-in-hand

When the adult education system is to contribute to qualifying the entire workforce with skills for the green transition, it mustn’t overlook basic skills - particularly digital skills.

Around one million Danes struggle with weak basic IT skills, with only a slightly lower number struggling to read and write. Both are barriers to the necessary continuing and further education required for the green transition, says Knudsen.

"We therefore recommend that extra efforts are put into strengthening basic skills. Meanwhile, our analysis made it clear that the green and digital transitions are inextricably linked. Green and digital skills support each other, so it's important to be able to work with new digital solutions that will be used for the green transition," she says.

10 years of working with green education

If we as a society are to achieve the green transition, we must focus our attention on more than just the workforce. All citizens must be educated to think and act green. Here too adult learning can help drive long-term change.

Denmark’s environmental organisation NOAH has spent the last 10 years boosting green education. They create freely available educational materials for different age groups, hold theme days and workshops at schools and educational institutions, organise community meetings, networking seminars and community visits.

All the efforts and activities are based on the organisation's overall vision of a fair and sustainable world where decisions are made democratically.

"If we are to achieve a successful sustainable transition, we need a green education with a solid foundation," says Anna Baastrup Rønne, project employee at NOAH and contact person for the organisation's thematic group ”Grøn Dannelse” (Greencation). 

Anna Baastrup Rønne, project employee at NOAH

Firstly, we need a lot of knowledge and information. Secondly, Baastrup Rønne believes we need to rediscover materiality and understand where materials come from, so that citizens gain a greater understanding of how their own actions and choices affect the environment and people elsewhere in the world. It is about understanding how we as citizens are spun into unsustainable forms of production with a heavy drain on the planet's resources.

Furthermore, we need to rediscover the practicality of the past and the belief that it is possible to come up with solutions together.

"We also need to train and develop our utopia muscle so that we can come up with clear visions and have the courage to think differently, to imagine other ways of living. If we are to create a sustainable world, we must be able to dream and develop real utopias for the society of the future," says Baastrup Rønne. 

Folk high school pathway created green empowerment

Part of NOAH’s green education combines subject-specific knowledge and critical social analysis with a focus on solutions, vision and, above all, the desire to act. They deploy didactic methods and principles of ESD - Education for Sustainable Development, and an interaction between theory/academic knowledge and practice/physical knowledge.

In collaboration with Danish folk high school Jyderup Højskole, NOAH developed a special folk high school pathway entitled "Green Guerilla" - designed to develop young adults' ability to act in support of sustainable development.

The basic idea of the project was that future environmental and climate challenges call for increased mobilisation within the civil society. The goal of "Green Guerilla" was to create an education that gave students the tools to achieve a sustainable transition in their own lives and surroundings - a green education that would cover practical, political and personal aspects.

Both short and long courses were offered - ranging from 12 to 24 weeks with an average of 14 lessons per week. The teaching was a mix of highly professional presentations on everything from biodiversity, the agricultural sector, cultivation of land, to construction and knowledge of social conditions, meeting people who have made sustainable choices in their lifestyle, and plenty of practical work.

"When you have to create a sustainable garden, build a greenhouse or a chicken coop from recycled materials, you gain a more practical and easily understandable foundation for talking about complex issues, and the practical work helps fertilise the ground for more sustainable development because you show students how they can take action themselves," says Baastrup Rønne.

This turns possible paralysis into action, and the framework at the school clearly shows a community of action.

The folk high school pathway ran from 2015-2022, when Jyderup Højskole unfortunately has to close. 

Community-based farming

Another way NOAH is giving citizens a green education is by spreading awareness and boosting opportunities to set up community-based farming in Denmark. In 2023, NOAH held networking seminars, organised farm visits and community visits around Denmark. They focused their attention on areas where there is a burgeoning interest in actively establishing local community-based farming.

Because if you want to bring about a fundamental change in agriculture for the benefit of biodiversity, the aquatic environment, local populations and the global climate, you can’t just blame industrial farming. NOAH also believes in the importance of highlighting other routes to better farming.

"It serves as a specific example of how local citizens can help make changes in support of sustainable development," says Baastrup Rønne.

Community-based farming relies on annual contracts between the farmer and consumer. Once a year or in installments, local consumers pay the farmer an upfront feet - and then receive vegetables, fruit, herbs, meat, eggs, dairy or other products for the rest of the year.

The contract ensures that the farmer gets their livelihood and the consumer gets their food, while both sharing the risks of farming and enabling individual farms to develop more sustainably with a focus on crop diversity, improved soil conditions and biodiversity protection.

Because the number of buyers of the harvest is known in advance, food waste can be minimised. Customers live in the local area, reducing transportation and fuel consumption. And waste and packaging is reduced as customers can, for example, bring their own basket when collecting the produce.

"The local citizens also get a completely different close relationship with the food producer, because these community-based farms tend to build relationships with their members through newsletters, weeding days, harvest parties or other activities," says Baastrup Rønne. 

Local perspective is crucial

NOAH's green education is generally based on a desire to get people more involved in their local area, and the organisation has just been accredited with Erasmus+ Adult, which will further empower it to support and organise local initiatives around Denmark.

According to NOAH, if you really want to make a difference to the global climate crisis, you as a citizen need to view the crisis from a local perspective.

"When I started at NOAH 10 years ago, CO2 in the atmosphere was a big part of the conversation on climate change, but very little is being said about it in the context of where the individual citizen lives and how they act. But if we are to create sustainable development, citizens need to be able to understand and anchor both climate challenges and solutions locally," says Baastrup Rønne.