and a 1997 study14 estimated their value to business equated to at least US$33 trillion a year. A 2008 study15 estimated the annual economic cost of loss of ecosystem services by biodiversity and ecosystem degradation at 3.3-7.5% of global GDP, or US$2-4.5 trillion. Green jobs can transform these huge and avoidable economic losses into health, social, environmental and economic gains.
In Storm Cunningham’s restoration economy, eight ‘giant, fast-growing industries are renewing our natural and built environments’ – and creating vibrant businesses as they revitalize communities. He sees future economic growth being based on renewing our natural, built and socio-economic assets:
It’s such a wonderful alternative to the empty growth-based consumerism that has left so many of us stranded on the shores of the current recession. The emerging focus on adult vocational training as a positive force for employment gains and environmental change brings together the knowledge-based and the restoration economies.
With this inspiring vision in mind, let’s see who can become part of this gathering economic wave.
Who is environmental training for?
The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.
Alvin Toffler, author of Future Shock and The Third Wave
This book is for environmental experts delivering training and training experts supporting them.
It’s also for people in the process of becoming environmental experts in their own workplaces or for their own sectors.
It’s needed by people in both the developed and developing worlds:
It’s needed by people in every occupation:
Businesses and utilities: use this book to help set up environmental training for your own staff and subcontractors. You can also have input to government-sponsored environmental training programs for businesses in order to make sure that your needs and constraints are well understood. In this way you will strengthen the relevance and effectiveness of the training for all parties – and enjoy the increased staff engagement, productivity and profitability that will result.
Professional, trades and industry associations and workplace unions: take the initiative for the professional learning and development of your members with regard to the environment – with the associated benefits in skills and engagement.
Tertiary educators: this book will help you develop your students’ capacity to make a difference in their chosen workplaces and communities.
Human resources personnel: HR specialists, especially those involved with learning and development, can use this book to offer support to environmental experts developing and delivering training programs
Professional trainers: companies or institutions that deliver environmental training and education can build up specialist environmental expertise or partnerships with environmental specialists to help them deliver excellent training
Supply chain managers: this book will help you encourage and require good environmental practice in your supply chains and procurement policies. It will help you take a training approach to building the environmental capacity of your existing and prospective service providers.
Environmental regulators: councils and government environmental agencies – use this book to develop and enhance the education and training programs you run or support, and to work constructively with your community stakeholders.
Government agencies and not-for-profit groups: use this book to set up your own environmental training programs for specific target audiences, such as people doing on-the-ground environmental work.
Environmental community groups, first (indigenous) peoples with environmental objectives and other environmental and not-for-profit groups: these groups have always played a major role in environmental improvement. They are a great example of the skills and capacity-building that result from well-run environmental initiatives, and the associated flow-on economic benefits.
People in these groups are adult learners: they have left their formal schooling and are working or looking for work. There are case studies of environmental training in some of these sectors in Chapter 3.
 | You don’t have to be an environmental expert to start with. Just start and your expertise will grow over time. |
If you want or need to set up environmental training, you don’t have to be an environmental expert to start with. The people who set up the training that is the major case study for this book were experts at rural soil conservation – but they had to learn about urban soil conservation on big, fast-moving and temporary construction sites, a field where they were novices. They understood soil and water, and in writing their guidelines, learned a great deal about erosion and sediment control on construction sites. But it took probably five or six years before people working with those sites really became experts – and they’re still learning. Real experts never stop learning!
Figure 1 shows how becoming a genuine expert is a personal as well as a professional journey of life-long – and, as Jost Reichsmann says – life-wide, learning. It doesn’t matter where you start – with the right support anyone can become one of the environmental experts that every sector needs.
Focused as it is on work-based performance training, this book is not for school teachers and their pupils – though the partnership principle and other elements of the seven-step model will certainly help teachers make a strong case for introducing, or continuing, school-based environmental education programs.
However, many environmental regulators and not-for-profit groups deliver excellent environmental education
