When it comes to preparing for, fighting against and adapting to global warming, community colleges are resiliency no-brainers. So it makes sense to the American Association for Community Colleges, whose thousand-plus campuses serve over half of America’s undergraduates, that their students should be trained in job skills with a real future.
“Municipal leaders are charged with mobilizing the community and training workers in climate change-related disaster preparedness and recovery,” president Walter G. Bumphus prefaced AACC’s new report A Guide to Climate Resiliency and the Community College. “Two-year colleges are clear partners in setting and meeting local and regional resiliency goals. They have the expertise and community relationships to effectively deliver training and community programs that will help rebuild infrastructure, make advances in clean energy and rebound after natural disasters.”
AACC argues that sustainability programs promoting and training students in solar and wind, energy efficiency and much more already have a significant track record with the public and private sector. One can see it flowering today at California’s Skyline College, whose award-winning Energy Systems Technology Management department is catching fire. Meanwhile, the state’s southbound Cerritos College just launched a “first-of-its-kind” cleantech program to train veterans and civilians how to maintain and evolve California’s accelerating solar and EV infrastructure. And that’s just one state.
“What is new here is not the content but the context,” AACC’s report explains during a West Coast case study, encompassing not just cleantech-minded community colleges in California but also Oregon and Washington. “Energy efficiency in context of resiliency is a multilayered response to climate risk. And this broader view of the industry widens the field of EE-related jobs and training: beyond energy auditors and weatherization crews, we see outcome brokers, community health workers, manufacturing technicians, procurement specialists, and others come into focus.”
Further AACC case studies in the West Coast focus on post-disaster emergency response and healthcare, as well as urban planning and green infrastructure, while its lone East Coast case study on cross-sector resiliency (PDF) delves into information technology and coding skills that will come in might handy in an internetworked crisis dystopia.
Indeed, community colleges, and their millions of students, need to “integrate resiliency into every corner of the curricula,” the AACC concludes. In the last couple of years, the United States spent north of $130 billion responding to global warming’s ravages, a crippling cost that is surely to rise as exponential warming takes hold. By comparison, training tomorrow’s students in anything else but cleantech and resiliency looks like a loss leader.
This article appeared at Solar Energy