Green jobs, broadly defined, are positions that “produce goods or provide services that benefit the environment or conserve natural resources.” They are also “jobs in which workers’ duties involve making production processes more environmentally friendly.” Someone who works in this field could be a park ranger or manufacturing engineer at a food processing plant.

According to the United Nations, there could be as many as 24 million green jobs by 2030. However, higher education and the environmental sector are struggling to prepare young Black, indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) students in the U.S. for these opportunities.

Adam Pearson, an associate professor of psychology at Pomona College in Southern California, says “Green STEM fields are unique in their overrepresentation of white people compared with the other sciences.” He goes on to point out that within academic disciplines such as environmental studies, conservation biology, and climate science “You find up to twice the level of disparities, sometimes up to three times the level of disparities as you do in other physical sciences.”

The reasons behind this gap are complex. Barriers range from the high cost of financing a college education to perceptions about the availability of job opportunities in the field. Jessica Ruf, a writer for Diverse Issues in Higher Education, posits that “many minority students don’t see it as a field in which they can find a job and, thus, not worth the investment.” Additionally, diversity critics of the field argue that substantial portions of the curriculum–what students read and reflect on–are themselves racist and colonial. That’s not exactly welcoming to a Latinx or Native American student.

And the U.S. is not alone. In the U.K., just 3.5% of those who work in the environment sector identify as a minority.

As a minority professor in an environmental studies department whose colleagues are mostly white, I appreciate our department’s recent initiative to address these issues. We want to hire more faculty of color, actively recruit BIPOC students, and teach environmental science lessons to nearby K-12 students living in low-income, primarily immigrant neighborhoods. But our efforts are not enough.

Systemic racism exists in our K-12 education system, leaving many students of color with fewer educational opportunities than their white counterparts. As a result, first year BIPOC college students tend to be less college-ready once they enter the higher education system. Overarching barriers like these help us understand why Blacks make up less than three percent of bachelor degrees in environmental science and why leadership of many prominent environmental nonprofit organizations continues to be dominated by White people.

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the need for environmental scientists and specialists is predicted to increase from 89,500 in 2016 to 99,400 by 2026. The need for solar photovoltaic installers over the same time period will more than double, from 11,300 to 23,100. We will need 58,300 environmental engineers by 2026. These positions are lucrative. For example, each engineering job pays, on average, over $86,000 a year.

Five out of the eight key jobs in the field identified by the Bureau don’t require a college degree. And these numbers don’t include many new green jobs that are becoming commonplace in corporate America and large non-profit organizations–that of sustainability professionals. Just this spring, NetFlix, Google, and Apple were hiring for managerial positions in sustainability.

Traditionally, environmental justice focused primarily on Not in My Backyard (or NIMBY) issues. Think hazardous waste landfills and oil and gas refineries spewing polluted air from their smokestacks in poor communities. A key tenet of the movement is ensuring that underrepresented communities do not bear a disproportionate share of the negative environmental impacts of human activity. Illustrative examples include higher rates of asthma, cancer, and neurological development delays.

However, the environmental justice movement should also emphasize an important corollary–providing education and professional training opportunities to BIPOC and low-income K-12 students, under-employed adults, and two- and four-year college students so they can be ready to meet growing demand.

To effectively tackle the climate crisis–which places greater health and environmental burdens on low-income communities of color–we need more diversity in the environmental field. I’m glad my department is taking actions to address these issues, but also overwhelmed by the enormity of the task. It will take many more departments at our university and universities all over the U.S. to make a dent in reducing the disparity. Not until then can we make meaningful progress creating equitable climate solutions for everyone.

The solution is the integration of environmental education in k-12 and higher education systems. Our youth must understand today’s most pressing sustainability issues from multiple perspectives, be able to facilitate discussion about them, and take action to address them. Imagine an environmentally literate citizenry where adopting environmental reach codes for your city is a no brainer and there aren’t any climate deniers, because everyone learned the scientific basis behind climate change in 6th grade. We’ll understand the interplay between the natural and social sciences in natural resource and pollution problems. Everyone will be able to apply rational criteria for deciding which of many existing options can be used to get us the energy we need while at the same time protecting our natural environment and not breaking the bank.

Promoting climate change understanding, skills, and pro-environmental behavior in our children are key to obtaining the popular support needed to turn policies into action. And while there are many individual stand out programs and educators, most of these wins have been highly localized and tend to take place in more affluent, white communities. Charles Saylan of UCLA, an environmental educator himself and author of The Failure of Environmental Education (and How We Can Fix It) laments that environmental education programs often emphasize building knowledge and awareness over action and advocacy. Another challenge he identifies is that “the standards on which public education is[sic] based don’t include environmental education.”

With better integration of environmental education into public education standards, the k-12 and higher education system we can create a citizenry that’s ready to handle the coming extreme weather events, socioeconomic inequities, and damage to natural resources that climate change will inevitably bring. We can foster the development of critical thinkers who understand that today’s economy takes place within a finite physical system that possesses finite natural resources known as the Earth. They will  know that environmental justice is social justice.

An environmentally literate populace will understand that modern environmentalism isn’t just about calling out the Girl Scouts cookie manufacturers because they use palm oil in their cookies whose growing practices destroy orangutan habitat and use child labor. Efforts like these are certainly laudable, but they are not the full story. Holistic climate and environmental education includes talking honestly about the unhoused population living along our local creeks and how to balance keeping our waterways clean with respecting people’s humanity. It’s about acknowledging the history of racism and lack of diversity that dominates the environmental studies field and changing it to both acknowledge thought leaders of color and create a welcoming culture where all students feel welcome. It means preparing a diverse student body for good-paying full-time jobs in the new green economy. It means providing students with regular environmental instruction, not just spirited platitudes on Earth Day.

Impossible you say? I beg to differ. There are hundreds of free interdisciplinary lesson plans on the environment and climate change for students in grades kindergarten through high school that already align with Next Generation and state science standards, for example those developed by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the U.S. Geological Survey, and NASA.  The Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education, the organization that developed standards for assessing sustainability in the curriculum for colleges and universities, has over 1,000 universities that are actively measuring how integrated sustainability is in their curriculum.

At Arizona State University for example, more than 14% of courses include or focus on sustainability. At San Jose State, more than 90% of our departments have at least one class that includes sustainability. And if k-12 lesson plans need tweaking to make them more hands-on and localized, we have thousands of local university students and faculty with the expertise to customize the learning experience to individual schools.

As an educator with over 25 years experience working in public and private universities, trust me when I say that college students would jump at the chance to do this work. In short, we actually can reach everyone in the k-12 and college system with resources that exist today.

We need to support better integration of holistic environmental education from the time our kids enter kindergarten to the time they graduate from college. By doing so we help cultivate a world where future generations will be able to live in a cleaner, greener, more just, and safer world. The climate crisis took generations to create and it will take a generational investment in our children’s education to fix.

The Biden Administration’s appointment of John Kerry to a newly created position, Special Presidential Envoy for Climate, as well the re-entry of the U.S. into the Paris Climate Accord, are tangible evidence that national political leadership considers the environment a priority. The problems are big, requiring what UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres describes as “fundamental transformations in all aspects of society — how we grow food, use land, fuel our transport and power our economies.” These high level moves are promising, however action and education from the ground up is equally essential for tackling this looming existential threat.