Onward and upward
Our final thoughts on the year and a look forward to 2024. Merry Christmas!
When we started writing The Green Edge two years ago, we had no fixed and firm agenda, other than to turn over a few stones in the stream of progress towards ‘skilling up for Net Zero’, to see what we found there, and to write about it. First of all, for our own discovery and then perhaps for the benefit of anyone who might wish to subscribe to our new (at the time) Substack newsletter.
Our results, in terms of output at least, were scattered. Our first year (2022) posts ranged from sweeps across whole sectors to interesting green innovations in our own backyard; from trying to navigate the plethora of government policy and legislation, to interviews with organisations making a sustainable go of it in otherwise unlikely circumstances; and from climate change M.Sc. business programmes (our first post), through higher and further education, all the way through to schools mainstream and complementary curricula.
Moving into 2023, we wrote in our first post of this year that we felt the need to sharpen our focus. We called out the roles and interactions between institutions, both national and local, together with the need for good data and proper definitions of occupations and skills, as being most worthy of our attention. Here, at the end of 2023, we feel that these factors – together with their associated concerns – are still crucial. Some have been progressed, others less so.
Image: TGE
While our attention may have occasionally wandered during 2023, not least due to being occasionally offered the opportunity to step up from being mere commentators and become actively actively engaged, we have maintained our focus wherever possible. At institutional levels, we examined the roles of the multiplicity of actors in the English Local Skills Improvement Plans (LSIPs), the Scottish Government and its CESAP implementation, and a range of bodies we consider to be key to the green agenda, like the Design Council, IEMA, CIWM, and the UK Catapult Network. Alongside that, we wrote and podcasted on some of the organisations that, in our view, are leading the way in unlocking Britain’s economic potential through data and insights. And, in the area of occupations and skills, we made a whole raft of posts, including a look at those jobs and skills that could be involved in winning hearts and minds for sustainability, perhaps the most difficult task of all.
As a backdrop to the above, we did, of course, keep an eye on the big government developments through the year – although, as we wrote in our post last week, we have found some of the strategic decisions made by Westminster and Whitehall to be truly perplexing.
So, where do we take The Green Edge in 2024? More of the same, or different? The short answer is, a little of both. But before we drop too much into the weeds on that, let us go back to something we touched on earlier, which was the work in which we’ve been actively engaged this year. Starting with support to IEMA in 2022 during the development of its Green Careers Hub, early in 2023 we were invited to participate in green skills deep dives done as part of the Cumbria and Surrey Local Skills Improvement Plans (LSIPs). Following that, we were engaged to collaborate and produce a series of podcasts for, and on behalf of, City & Guilds. The first public episode of this series is now released, and will continue into 2024.
And, at the close of 2023, we are delighted to announce a new collaboration with Enginuity, the charity dedicated to finding new ways to close skills gaps in UK engineering and manufacturing. We’ll tell you more about that as we progress into next year.
We believe these collaborations afford us enhanced insights into the needs and developments of skills for Net Zero and beyond. Leveraging these insights, together with our ‘business-as-usual’ discovery work, leads us to thinking that we can perhaps focus The Green Edge in 2024 on providing the following services to aid the efforts of the many highly skilled and motivated people who are trying to convert Britain into a truly sustainable nation.
First, to tell stories of best practice. Our view is that sustainability actions are best done locally and, in many cases, best practice is to be found through examining local actions. We see much effort being made nationally and internationally to compete in the race for thought leadership, but our observation is that the most effective action leadership is being done by local governments; by community groups; and by SMEs with sustainability-minded individuals at the helm. But one of the problems we see with this is in disseminating information on a peer-to-peer basis. We see some valuable convenors and disseminators in this process, among them UK100, Ashden and others. The Green Edge is neither positioned nor has ambition to be a convenor, but we would hope our stories – like the ones we ran this year on Yellow Interiors and the Repair Café network – can continue to be useful and help to inform the development of better policies.
Second, to champion competences for sustainability. We’ve heard many times this year from practitioners, educators and others in fields critical for sustainability that the current British education system is not fit-for-purpose and is not providing anywhere near enough people who are competent to carry out, at scale and at speed, the tasks required. From competent – not merely qualified – apprentices; to upskilled workforce incumbents or returners; to schoolchildren with sufficient knowledge of the careers that await them and the motivation to learn them, we hear of shortfalls. We hear many stories of initiatives to build competence, we can at least reflect some of what we hear.
Third and last, to discover and document what needs to be done to engage hearts and minds in the path towards a sustainable future. Regardless of one’s opinion of the Nudge Unit, its January 2023 report How to Build a Net Zero Society concluded – correctly in our opinion – that while delivering Net Zero is an absolute necessity, ‘behaviour change is just as critical as, and inseparable from, technological innovation’.
‘Doing so depends on substantial social and behavioural change. Some of the biggest carbon reductions will come from the widespread adoption of cleaner technologies. We also require a range of lifestyle changes in how we travel, what we eat, when and how efficiently we use energy, and how we consume and dispose of material goods. Even supply-side issues like the expansion of clean power generation depend on social and behavioural constraints, such as public support’.
Source: Behavioural Insights Team, 2023
Finally, to mark our redefined goals for 2024, we’re launching our new logo. We’ve crispened the image as we’ve crispened our focus (plus, it’s easier to get it embroidered on to our new polo shirts). And we dropped the tagline ‘Skilling up for Net Zero’. This is more than being about mere skills and more than being just about Net Zero. This is about building people who are competent to create – and inherit – a sustainable planet.
As for the rest, the song remains the same. We, Fraser Harper and Michael Cross of The Green Edge, wish you all a Happy Christmas and a Sustainable New Year.
Image: ohmaoh