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PLANET: Education for environmental sustainability and green growth, a publication taken from the full 2016 Global Education Monitoring Report, explores the knowledge and skills needed for sustainable and inclusive economic growth that does not damage our planet.

This publication demonstrates how education can help people understand and respond to environmental issues and climate change. Environmental education can increase green knowledge and build sustainability practices. The publication warns that while education contributes to economic growth, education systems must be careful not to encourage unsustainable lifestyles and all learners must acquire the knowledge and skills needed to promote sustainable development.

It also argues that we must continue to learn throughout our lives in order to make production and consumption sustainable, and to provide green skills for green industries. Creating green industries relies on high-skill workers with specific training, yet by 2020 there could be 40 million too few workers with tertiary education relative to demand. Higher education and research should also be oriented towards green innovation and growth; innovation depends on cooperation in higher education and investment in research and development to transform production in vast swaths of the economy.

It also recognises that education must change in order to keep up with the changing face of work. Green and transferable skills should be taught in both school and the workplace. The greening of industries requires not only the production of more high-skill workers, but the continued training and education for low and medium skill workers, often on the job.

“To ensure the Sustainable Development Goals are implemented, everyone involved needs to think, to work, to organise, to communicate and to report in ways that are completely different from what has been done up till now. Education truly is key to a wide appreciation not just of the SDGs but the new ways of thinking and working that are going to be necessary to fulfil them. So the challenge to all of us is to re-learn, and that does not just apply to educators, but it applies to all of us.”