As extreme heat events continue to increase in both frequency and intensity, and atmospheric rivers and wildfires cause increasingly costly damages across communities, it is more urgent than ever to tackle the climate crisis with dedicated, collective, and systemic action.
One area of opportunity to address these issues is through the growing demand for climate-skills in the workforce. The need to transition to a more sustainable economy requires workers that can support industries to adapt to the impacts of climate change, whilst also reducing carbon emissions across a multitude of sectors. Many of these roles require a postsecondary education, demonstrating the need for universities to make climate change content central to more courses, and to enable students to develop the skills and experiences needed to address the kind of complex interdisciplinary challenges presented by the climate emergency.
Caren Lombard, Lecturer in the Sauder School of Business, Dr. Tamara Etmannski, Assistant Professor in Civil Engineering, and Dr. Qingshi Tu, Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Forestry, aim to support these needs through their new curriculum project, Accounting for Climate Change: Expanding Civil Engineering, Wood Science and Accounting Courses for Climate Relevancy.
By developing modular content that covers topics such as climate reporting, embodied carbon calculations, life-cycle analysis (LCA) and carbon/GHG accounting (basic and advanced), they hope to improve carbon/sustainability accounting literacy and equip students with new skills that will allow them to thrive in the modern climate-focused workplace.
This project is funded by the Sustainability Education Fellows Program, managed by the UBC Sustainability Hub, where Vancouver-based faculty members can receive up to $20,000 to lead the development of sustainability or wellbeing-centred curriculum projects.
Industry demand for “green skills” includes getting specific about quantifying carbon emissions
Carbon accounting specifically has been identified as one of the most in-demand green skills within leadership roles in 2023, according to a report funded by the Future Skills Centre (FSC), with financial support from the Government of Canada’s Future Skills Program (p. 13). However, a recent study examining Canadian civil engineering programs revealed that, within undergraduate curricula, courses teaching climate-relevant skills are few.
Before now, Lombard (Sauder) remarks that although students learn financial accounting, “nowhere in the curriculum are students actually learning the detail[s] [of] carbon accounting.”
Emphasis is largely put on learning general, qualitative knowledge: “[Sauder students] learn about the bigger climate issues. They learn about sustainability strategies, broader issues of making a business more sustainable, etc.”
What’s more, though financial and carbon accounting are distinct skills–with the latter focusing on calculating greenhouse gas emissions–they are also interconnected.
“It's about measuring the carbon so that you can implement reduction strategies,” Lombard explains.
By tracking how much companies emit and where these emissions happen, students can better “make their case” on deciding how to best prioritize financial resources when deciding where to focus reduction efforts. Having both skills, then, can give students an edge in a competitive job market.
Students in Civil Engineering face a similar situation. “There's a lot of learning around sustainability and climate change at a foundational level,” Dr. Etmannski details, “but not at all, in a quantified way.”
But, she continues, “there is this desire from the engineers to learn more about how to quantify impact and how to do these kinds of calculations, even though they themselves don't do finance.”
And industry demand is growing. As Dr. Etmannski notes, “there's now an expectation that engineers not only understand how to do [these calculations], but [can] make the connection between these calculations and their design decisions, very specifically.”
By increasing sustainability/carbon accounting literacy, students will enter the workforce confident that their skillsets are better aligned with industry needs.
Case studies support developing hard skills and soft skills
To ensure the skills student learn are applicable, new modules developed as part of this curriculum project will consist of experiential learning exercises, giving students a chance to interact and collaborate with companies, and/or case studies derived from real scenarios.
One source of these in-progress case studies, Lombard mentioned, comes from analysis work in her course, COMM 486E Climate-Focused ESG Reporting and Analysis. In this example, students worked with small companies to calculate greenhouse gas emissions.
For example, when calculating the emissions for an accounting firm operating in Victoria and Vancouver, “there's electricity emissions from the offices, natural gas emissions from the offices; if they own company vehicles there's emissions from that,” Lombard says, giving a hint to just some of the variables being factored into these calculations.
Outside of the numbers, Dr. Tu sees another benefit.
By getting exposed to case studies that span three distinct disciplines, students will have to navigate unfamiliar topics whilst strategizing about, “how to communicate [their] request and [their] results within a company [and] with different stakeholders,” he notes, “which is a very important skill that we want to build for the students.”
Taking an unconventional approach with modules
Beyond the content itself, there’s also the challenge of how to best integrate sustainability/carbon accounting concepts into existing curricula.
The solution? Modules: condensed lesson plans that focus on specific topics.
First, modularized content allows case studies to be shared as open-source resources. These free-of-charge resources give instructors and students all the necessary instructions and materials to use them in classrooms without coaching from any of the project members or other specialized experts.
Second, recognizing how busy Civil Engineering, Sauder, and Forestry course schedules often are, modularized content can be more accessible.
For graduate students and industry professionals hoping to update their green skills, modules let them to learn these skills in a few weeks (e.g., via a micro-certificate program) or even just over a weekend. This way, Dr. Tu shares, “we can really reach out to a bigger community.”
Likewise, for undergraduate students, rather than having to restructure their entire degree timeline for a few specific sustainability/carbon accounting courses, existing courses can be adjusted to include the new modules.
“If we can get one week or even one class and some recording prep time that the students watch,” Lombard says, “then we can actually reach more students in that way.”
For example, modules on the basics of carbon accounting can be incorporated into Sauder’s introductory accounting courses, reaching hundreds of students every year. Modules covering embodied carbon, which, according to Dr. Etmannski, “is another type of calculation that's much more complex, connected to infrastructure and buildings,” can be integrated into existing Civil Engineering courses.
Ultimately, the structure of modules themselves offer flexibility, while open-source case studies ensure easy access to the content itself, giving students ample opportunities to learn in practical ways.
Fostering an educational environment where students have the green skills needed to be climate leaders
The curriculum project team’s motivation to better align curricula in Sauder, Civil Engineering, and Forestry with in-demand climate skills reflects their own experiences.
Sharing a personal anecdote, Lombard reflects on how, when she first started learning carbon accounting, “it was difficult to find courses; it was difficult to find cases, exercises, textbooks.”
Now, as leaders in their respective industries, Lombard, Dr. Etmannski, and Dr. Tu are helping to establish a modern educational environment for students to learn and apply essential new skills to help industry address the climate emergency.