Are workforce skills the next sustainability crisis?
February 21, 2024
Climate change has occupied most public discussions of sustainability, but sustainability means much more. In 2015, United Nations Member States agreed to achieve 17 ambitious Sustainable Development Goals, or SDGS, by 2030. A few goals aim at reducing pollution and greenhouse gas emissions, but most aim to improve people’s lives through advancing social institutions like education, healthcare, and government.
Together, the goals aim to advance economic development in regions experiencing extreme poverty while avoiding a range of injustices, most obviously pollution. In other words, the goals represent a plan for economic development decoupled from harmful externalities.
Among the SDGs, at least two directly relate to workforce learning: quality education (SDG 4) and decent work and economic growth (SDG 5). But practically every goal in the UN’s SDGs is unattainable without strong workforce learning. For example, without electricians and workers skilled in advanced manufacturing, countries will struggle to provide affordable and clean energy (SDG 7), and without enough skilled healthcare workers, too few people will have access to good health and well-being (SDG3)
Still, despite the far-reaching effects of workforce learning, access to quality learning opportunities and decent work is scarce across the world, in developing and developed countries alike. For all these reasons, workforce learning needs to be seen as a major sustainability crisis.
Viewing workforce skills through the lens of sustainability offers notable advantages. It can motivate companies to invest more in their employees, highlighting that employee development is central to corporate social responsibility. It can help pressure governments to devote greater resources toward work-relevant education. And it places workforce learning at the center of one of the most pressing ethical challenges facing the world today: How do we achieve both global sustainability and justice, especially for populations least responsible for, but most vulnerable to, the effects of pollution and climate change?
Sustainability means not only protecting the environment and biodiversity for future generations but ensuring that people can live well now. An oft-cited definition for sustainable development comes from the UN’s Brundtland Report published in 1987: “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”
With sustainable development defined this way, it’s clear that the world meets neither condition of sustainability. Far too many people are unable to meet their needs today, and there are few indications that meaningful progress is being made to ensure future generations can meet their needs tomorrow.
In a preface to the most recent UN report on global progress toward sustainability goals, António Guterres, Secretary-General of the United Nations, writes, “We are at a moment of truth and reckoning.” According to the report, meaningful progress has been made on only 20 percent of targets set for the SDGs while 50 percent have stalled, and 30 percent have regressed since 2015.
The report offers this stark assessment: “It is time to sound the alarm. At the midpoint on our way to 2030, the Sustainable Development Goals are in deep trouble.”
Given current trends, extreme poverty and poor access to education and decent work will continue to be problems long after the 2030 deadline for achieving the SDGs. The UN predicts that, by 2030, 575 million people will be living in extreme poverty, defined as subsisting on less than $2.15 per day. By that same year, 300 million people are predicted to lack basic numeracy and literacy.
Current access to decent work across the world is dismal and progress has been too slow. Between 2015 and 2022, the global percentage of workers in informal economies hardly budged, crawling down from 58.6 to 58.0 percent. Such high numbers are distressing as work in informal economies, where official oversight is absent, is notorious for low pay and labor abuses. While most people in the world work in informal economies, percentages are astonishingly high in Central and Southern Asia (84.8%) and Sub-Saharan Africa (87.2%).
To solve these challenges, workers must have access to learning opportunities that enable them to enter formal economies and gain decent work, even as societies undergo green transitions and technological change accelerates. But this challenge offers an opportunity. Investments in workforce skills and other sustainability efforts can be designed to be mutually reinforcing, as shown by a recent surge in investments in green energy and other development projects in economically distressed areas of the United States.
A lot of questions remain, but seeing workforce learning as a sustainability issue brings new insight and urgency to longstanding workforce challenges. The GOF hopes to provide a forum for discussing some of these questions. Most crucial:
- How can workforce learning be more precisely defined as a sustainability issue? What characteristics are essential for sustainable workforce learning?
- Who bears responsibility, both locally and globally, for building sustainable workforce learning systems? What responsibilities do wealthier countries have to support workforce learning where populations are most vulnerable to climate change and environmental injustice? What responsibilities do companies have? What responsibilities do individuals bear?
- What benefits, and risks, do countries and companies face by building, or failing to build, sustainable workforce learning systems?
- How can we help people make good choices for careers in a rapidly changing global economy?
- What do advances in technology mean for jobs, and for the economic sustainability of families and the communities they live in?
At the GOF, we are looking forward to continuing discussion on this exciting new domain. Such big challenges call for global action and collaboration.
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