Season's Greetings from The Green Edge
Wishing you compliments of the season and looking forward to seeing you on The Green Edge in 2022.
Season’s greetings from The Green Edge. Thank you for being one of our founding subscribers. We are delighted to announce that after our launch last week we now have over 70 subscribers from a wide range of educational, research, professional and business organisations. We hope you found our launch pack of articles interesting and useful, and once again we would like to thank our first contributors for their time and willingness to share knowledge and experience. Please do share with any of your friends or colleagues who you think will be interested in reading or contributing to our Green Edge articles.
In the launch pack, our two key topics were climate change business education and systems thinking for the green economy. This reflects how we intend to take Green Edge forward: we want to examine the qualitative detail of building skills for our greener future. At a time when many – often conflicting – figures are being published about numbers of green jobs being created, money being invested and people being trained, we created the Green Edge to drill down to the nitty-gritty of the needs, features and experiences of the green skills-building process. As the House of Commons Environmental Audit Committee (@CommonsEAC), wrote in October 2021[1]:
The Government is aiming for 2 million green jobs by 2030 [and] the green skills pipeline will determine both the number and types of UK green jobs which can be produced. We need to ensure we are training our current and future workforce now for the careers and demands of the future economy, and make climate and environmental literacy a priority across all education and training.
The Green Edge is aiming to contribute to the understanding what should run through that green skills pipeline. We will have conversations with key people at the supply and demand ends of the pipeline, and also with people – the educators – involved in making the pipeline flow. Importantly, we also intend to talk to people passing through the pipeline, either through education, upskilling, cross-skilling, or development of green skills as a co-product of other work.
We’re sure our brief will evolve. At all times we encourage you, our subscribers, to feed your thoughts and steers back to us, either through comments on the posts or via email at greenedge@bluemirrorinsights.com. The Green Edge was, after all, conceived as a tool for green skills networking, triggered by our green skills survey in September 2021 (you can read the final report from the survey here).
We are spending the Christmas period setting up our next articles, and shortly after the break we will start with a weekly newsletter, delivered by email to subscribers and also available here:
Also, if you like to receive your blogs through RSS feed, the feed location is https://greenedge.substack.com/feed.
The Green Edge newsletter is provided free to subscribers. We would, however, like to take this opportunity to issue an invitation for sponsors to cover our costs of upkeep and development. Our plan is to keep the number of sponsors to a fixed (small) group, who for a modest annual contribution will be invited onto our Green Edge Advisory Group, with representation in an agreed number of posts during their sponsorship period. Please contact us at greenedge@bluemirrorinsights.com if you or your organisation are interested in becoming a Green Edge sponsor.
As a final comment: our holiday reading list includes the recent POSTbrief: ‘Reducing the whole life carbon impact of buildings’ [2]. Given the Construction industry’s huge dependency on net zero skills, we were somewhat taken aback to find that the 50+ page report only mentions skills in a section relegated to the last two pages. Further, in that small section, the writers seem to hand off the skills agenda to bodies elsewhere, rather than taking the opportunity to describe the types of skills (rather than just the numbers) that might be required, in the context in which they will be required. Perhaps the Green Edge may be able to help with that understanding.
Once again, we wish you compliments of the season and we look forward to seeing you on The Green Edge in 2022.
Fraser Harper and Michael Cross.
[1] House of Commons Environmental Audit Committee, HC 75, 25 October 2021.
[2] https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/POST-PB-0044/POST-PB-0044.pdf