Headline: Green jobs are the future! IASS supports national “Green Day”

Climate and environmental protection are becoming increasingly important: Sustainable lifestyles, reducing CO₂ in the atmosphere and the energy transition are all decisive aspects affecting the future. As a result the green economy is growing and new jobs are being created that require committed and well educated new recruits. The fact that green jobs are the future is shown by Germany’s national “Green Day – Schools check out green jobs” on the 12^th of November 2013.

In 2010, 350,000 people were already working in the renewable energy sector. The German Institute for Economic Research (DIW) estimates that this figure will almost double by 2020. The fact that these developments are not only interesting for scientists and technicians is shown by the work conducted by the academics at the IASS Potsdam on, for example, fracking, which is a hotly debated issue both in Germany and worldwide, the impact of soot on the regional and global climate, soil as a threatened resource and the development of superconductors for transporting energy across long distances.

In these research projects, the IASS’s transdisciplinary approach combines the different perspectives of the academics working at the institute, who include psychologists, political scientists, chemists, communication scientists, geologists, physicists, economists, biologists, philosophers, sociologists and legal experts.

The “Green Day” was first launched in 2012 by the Zeitbild Stiftung and is funded by the German Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety (BMU) as part of the German federal government’s National Climate Protection Initiative. It gives school pupils from the 8th to 13th grades a chance to learn about vocational and study opportunities in the fields of environmental protection, green technologies and climate protection.

Students and teacher, Jörg Jacobs, from the Moser Schule Berlin (photo credit: Michele Ferrari)