From Climate Ambition to Capability: How the Green Skills Framework Helps Universities Deliver Real Impact
Over the past decade, universities everywhere have made bold climate commitments, from net-zero campuses to SDG-linked teaching. Hundreds have joined the UN-backed Race to Zero for Universities and Colleges campaign (educationracetozero.org; current signatories).
Over the past decade, universities everywhere have made bold climate commitments, from net-zero campuses to SDG-linked teaching. Hundreds have joined the UN-backed Race to Zero for Universities and Colleges campaign (educationracetozero.org; current signatories).
That energy has been inspiring. But in conversations with university partners, one question keeps surfacing: how do we document and show what progress looks like? Many institutions still struggle to show how these commitments translate into real learning and employment outcomes that serve the green and blue economy. What I’m hearing from university leaders across regions is consistent: ambition is no longer the differentiator. The real test is whether institutions can show evidence that skills, jobs, and resilience outcomes are materializing because of those commitments.
To help universities turn ambition into measurable capability, Times Higher Education developed the International Green Skills Framework, a global model for strengthening how institutions build and track green-skills development. The Framework gives universities a way to see how effectively green skills are being embedded across three student pathways: the Classroom, the Society, and the Global.
Each pathway reflects a stage in a student’s journey, first learning green concepts in the classroom, then applying them through partnerships and community projects, and finally carrying them into the wider world as professionals and global citizens. The Framework tracks progress across twelve categories and three types of skills: technical, human, and applied. The aim here is to understand institutional capability across the whole system.
In my experience working across global education and skills ecosystems, especially through initiatives with USAID, I’ve observed how structured partnerships and shared measurement frameworks can help institutions build genuine capability for the green transition. Within the Green Skills Framework, three areas illustrate how this can come to life in practice: aligning curricula with labour-market demand, expanding work-based learning, and building partnerships grounded in data and inclusion. These are the spaces where universities can connect ambition with tangible outcomes producing graduates who are ready for emerging sectors and contributing directly to resilient communities and responsive systems. The critical question is whether institutions have the systems in place to turn commitments into outcomes.
Curriculum-to-Market Alignment
A climate-ready workforce begins in the classroom. Universities are engines of green-skills development and can bring real-world relevance into the curriculum.
In Vietnam, the USAID BUILD-IT alliance (implemented with Arizona State University) strengthened university–industry collaboration to modernize STEM programmes and prepare work-ready graduates, a model that can readily be adapted for green-economy fields (BUILD-IT overview, ASU; programme snapshot). The Classroom Pathway captures this kind of institutional practice of aligning curricula with employer demand to equip students with sustainability and work-ready skills. Programmes that are shaped with employers and industry at the table are the ones that create real economic outcomes.
Under the Classroom Pathway, universities can use the Framework to benchmark such work. They can ask: how far do our courses embed sustainability competencies? how many are co-designed with employers? Tracking these questions shows how curriculum reform drives economic value and prepares graduates for changing labour markets.
“The next phase of climate accountability will belong to the institutions that can prove their graduates don’t just understand sustainability — they can deliver it.”
Source: Project: USAID BUILD‑IT Alliance (Vietnam)
Work-Integrated Learning Ecosystems
The most effective learning often happens outside the classroom. This is where skills are tested for their real-world value, whether they open doors to opportunity and earning potential. Within the Society Pathway, the Framework recognizes how universities, employers, and communities create shared spaces for students to apply what they know.
In the Philippines, USAID’s Opportunity 2.0 programme demonstrated this beautifully. It brought city colleges, local government, and business together to design training and placement routes that helped out-of-school youth move into jobs and entrepreneurship, including pathways into emerging sector (programme site; EDC project page). The Society Pathway focuses on how partnerships translate into outcomes that can be tracked and scaled.
Using the Framework, universities can track the reach and relevance of similar initiatives, not just counting placements, but assessing how internships, apprenticeships, and field projects contribute to local resilience plans. When institutions align hands-on learning with community sustainability goals, the results speak for themselves: stronger employability, visible local benefit, and genuine social proof of progress.
Source: USAID - Opportunity 2.0 Programme Site
Data-Driven Partnerships and Global Leadership
Data tells the story of impact. Shared definitions of green jobs and clear evidence pipelines can turn partnerships into effective strategy.
The USAID-funded Resilient Africa Network (RAN), led by Makerere University and involving around 20 African universities, operates regional innovation labs that use local evidence and resilience data to address climate-related shocks. Through these partnerships, universities are shaping policy and resilience responses at regional and national levels. A core focus of the Global Pathway is the system role of universities, where they influence policy, resilience strategies, and regional outcomes. We are entering a phase where universities will increasingly be assessed by their contribution to resilience and system-level outcomes, not just institutional outputs.
Through the Global Pathway, the Framework helps universities capture that kind of influence, documenting how collaborations, research, and alumni engagement shape policy and professional practice internationally. It challenges institutions to look beyond curriculum design and focus on the real-world change their teaching drives.
The Road Ahead
Real progress happens when universities connect learning, work, and evidence. Turning climate ambition into measurable capability depends on linking classroom learning with employer needs and community priorities. The International Green Skills Framework provides a way to track that capability, compare progress across institutions, and identify what is working. Over time, it provides a common basis for institutions to understand progress and improve practice.
As higher education enters a new era of climate accountability, the institutions that will stand out are those whose graduates not only understand sustainability but can apply it. In the years ahead, institutional credibility will be defined by the outcomes universities can show and the capabilities they build.
Ghazala Syed is a member of the Advisory Board for the Times Higher Education Green Learning Accelerator.