Future Ready Features: Enhancing Ambition, Enabling Action
WSP in the U.S.
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The ambition and action to help communities and organizations enhance their sustainability and build resilience to a changing climate.
Expanding the Corps
The green skills gap is a real and growing concern.
Currently, there are at least two times as many open positions in industries focused on achieving ambitious global climate action goals than there are qualified candidates to fill them. And that gap is expected to widen significantly in the coming years unless upskilling and reskilling of our workforce increases dramatically.
The American Climate Corps (ACC), launched by the U.S. federal government in 2023, is a positive training and service initiative that aims to put 20,000 participants on a path to working in the fight against climate change in its first year. That inaugural class, and presumably those that follow, will work on projects ranging from urban agriculture to clean energy deployment, and community outreach to environmental protection.
Working with uncertainty
Previously in this space, we’ve discussed how uncertainty is one hallmark of wicked, or highly complex, problems, and a big reason why such problems are hard to explain, navigate and solve.
Uncertainty is certainly baked into climate change. As such, when attempting to tackle that particularly thorny problem, we must attempt to create as much clarity and confidence as possible. That’s where climate research, trends analysis and simulation modeling become crucial.
These techniques and tools help to paint a picture of the various possible futures we may face. The data they deliver serves as the foundation of our understanding about different future scenarios and allows us to better communicate the inherent risks and opportunities associated with them through important reporting mechanisms.
Shiny new TROY
While our communities deal with the physical risks associated with climate change, and the damage and disruption they bring, the business community is wrestling with another set of risks.
Transition risks — associated with the transition to a low-carbon economy — can be financial, reputational, technological, legal or regulatory in nature, and they can impact any industry. Managing these risks is crucial for businesses, lest they result in increased operational costs, reduced market share and potential regulatory penalties.
That said, the low-carbon transition also presents real opportunities for companies to build an enduring market presence, such as cost savings from renewable energy, market share in green technologies, increased revenue from new low-carbon products and services, and enhanced corporate reputation.
That sinking feeling
It should come as no surprise that coastal communities are especially vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. This is true all over the globe, and the U.S. is no exception. But some areas are at particular risk due to compounding factors.
Those areas — which include many cities along the Eastern Seaboard — not only face the threat of flooding from increasingly severe storms and sea level rise, but they are also confronting increasing subsidence. Which is to say they are sinking.
Researchers at Virginia Tech’s Earth Observation and Innovation Lab report that up to 2.1 million people and 867,000 properties are directly affected by 2mm of subsidence annually. The problem is widespread and being driven by myriad factors, including resource extraction, social compaction and various natural events.
WSP at COP29
If you are interested in learning more about how WSP is aligning with and engaging in this year’s United Nations Conference of the Parties in Baku, Azerbaijan, visit us here .