Environmental Literacy and Workforce Development
Finding sustainable solutions to the complex challenges that dominate headlines throughout Maine and around the world requires a level of environmental literacy and new approaches to workforce development. Challenges such as the many impacts of climate change are urgent and require an ability to understand nuanced technical information from a wide variety of sources. To be effective, solutions must create new or enhanced career paths and training opportunities that serve all stages and sectors of the existing and potential workforce equitably. Ideally, they also form the basis for new opportunities or conditions that increase resilience to ongoing and expected future changes. Maine Sea Grant’s work in this focus area is integrated with the issues, content, and approaches used in our other three focus areas, and covers a continually evolving range of topics.
Our goal
An environmentally literate public and workforce are skilled and ready to use and apply scientific, traditional, and cultural knowledge to identify questions, draw evidence-based conclusions, and address issues that affect the ecological health, economic vitality, and resilience of coastal communities and ecosystems.