Achieving net zero goals requires all employees to understand sustainability

When climate change became a global concern, ex-Googler Anshuman Bapna set out to build Terra.do, a learning platform with a mission to get 100 million people to work directly on climate issues this decade. Since the launch in 2020, Terra.do has launched 15 programmes. Among these is a 12-week bootcamp, a programme for oil & gas workers transitioning to cleantech, another for early-stage VCs investing in climatech, for climate justice, corporate sustainability. They even have a climate farm school, a hybrid programme where learners get to live and work in farms that have regenerative farming practices, and a free climate programme for journalists.

“Climate change is completely upending sectors as large as energy and transportation, restructuring agriculture and construction, and even changing the nature of finance. Together, that’s more than a third of the world’s GDP that will change hands within the next 20-30 years,” says Bapna. “We think that every job can be a climate job!”

That’s exactly what Deepak Pargaonkar, vice president of solution engineering at Salesforce India, thinks too. He goes further. He says all jobs “should” be thinking “climate”. “It is important that employees are aware of what their company is doing towards sustainability as well as how they can contribute to it. You need to have the capability of having people who can understand what is required to work on the net zero goals,” he says. Salesforce’s learning platform Trailhead today hosts some 30 trails or programmes on sustainability.

Skills gap
While a talent gap exists across the board, Bapna says the key skill gap is in “hardtech” engineering. There are not enough skills in battery tech (EVs/storage), industrial process automation (for decarbonising steel/cement), synthetic biology (for alt-proteins). “There are not enough finance people that understand climate – this includes carbon accountants, ESG (environmental, social, governance) specialists, climate risk professionals, and project finance specialists,” he says.

Inderjeet Singh, partner at Deloitte India, says green skills are today a springboard for career growth. “Professionals with industry specific skill sets can acquire additional understanding around ESG issues and can offer integrated solutions to their employer. Such niche expertise will help them meet their career aspirations at a faster pace,” he says.

DD Mishra, senior director analyst at Gartner, says that skill gaps and culture are acting as big inhibitors to adoption of sustainability practices. Organisations in India, he says, need to reimagine sustainability roles and skills.

Raghav Gupta, MD at Coursera (India and Apac), says there are four reasons why companies care about ESG and SDG (sustainable development goals) and skilling for green jobs: to lower costs, attract customers, secure more investors, and attract talent. He says Coursera’s courses around sustainability are seeing large-scale adoption by governments, enterprises, universities, and individual learners to build capacity and invest in the critical skills required today.

Green for all
Efforts like these are beginning to pay off. Political science graduate Anirudh Gupta and industrial engineer Siddhanth Jayaram enrolled for Terra.do programmes separately, but came together later to build Climes.io, a climate finance and behaviour-change company. “There’s something that everyone can do, if you are curious enough about climate problems,” says Anirudh. Climes.io sells carbon credits to customers through their wallet and APIs (application programming interfaces) at the online checkouts of brands that are part of the programme. Buyers can collect climes and then use them to offset their carbon footprint by choosing to fund select sustainability projects in India. “It becomes the first place where a lay person can really get started with their own climate action,” says Anirudh.


WHAT SOFTWARE TALENT CAN DO
While climate solutions are a lot more “atoms” than “bits”, software has a critical enabling role to play. Some of the big areas that IT professionals should focus on are:

* Satellite & computer vision to parse image data to forecast agriculture productivity, wildfires, emissions, etc

* Machine learning skills to help electricity grids become smarter in allowing millions of EVs to plug into them without bringing the grid down

* Consumer-facing services that help individuals and companies track emissions, reduce their footprints, etc

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