Climate Ambition Is Outrunning the People Who Have to Deliver It

The green transition keeps stalling on the same shortage: people who can lead it. Two founders on why that is, at heart, an education problem, and what it takes to fix.

By Christian Rebernik and Thomas Funke

When Emily took a job as a sustainability manager, she walked in, by her own account, knowing "basically nothing." A short time later, she had guided her company's management team toward a net-zero strategy and felt ready to start executing it. She is one of our graduates, and hers is the story we keep returning to, because the distance she covered is the same distance the whole climate transition depends on. It is the gap between caring about sustainability, even knowing a great deal about it, and being able to walk into an organization and actually lead the change.

Most climate ambition dies in that gap.

Every week brings new corporate net zero targets, new disclosure rules, new regulations. The harder constraint is no longer the targets or the tools. It is whether enough people inside companies can turn those targets into decisions, and then into action. The data bears this out. LinkedIn's 2025 Green Skills Report found that demand for green skills has been growing roughly twice as fast as the supply of people who have them. The shortage is real, it is widening, and it will not be closed by the usual response, which is to produce more content about sustainability. Knowing about sustainability is not the same as being able to lead it.

 

Why the usual model fails this particular test

 

Karsten, another of our graduates, did his bachelor's at a traditional German university and his MBA with us. He describes the difference plainly: the old way trained him to memorize content for exams, while what stayed with him was learning to develop, in his words, "ways of thinking that actually apply to real-world challenges." That distinction is the whole point, and it matters more for sustainability than for almost any other subject.

Sustainability problems are messy. They cross disciplines, the rules keep moving, the data is incomplete, and reasonable people disagree about the right path. You cannot lecture someone into being able to navigate that. Long before we started the university, one of us had spent a career in the science of how people actually learn, and that research is settled on a few points education mostly ignores. People build real capability through autonomy, a sense of competence, and connection to others. In practice that means learning in short, focused pieces, then immediately applying them to a genuine challenge, being assessed on whether you can do the thing rather than recall it, and explaining what you learned to someone else, which is the moment it tends to stick. It means meeting people at the right level of difficulty, hard enough to stretch them, not so hard they give up. Knowledge crammed for an exam fades within weeks. Capability built by solving a real problem tends to stay.

A transition this large needs the second kind of learning, and a lot of it. The first kind, which still defines most of education, produces people who can describe the problem and name the framework, then freeze when asked to move an actual organization.

 

What applied learning produces

 

Ahmad came to us as a bachelor's student in AI and sustainable technologies. His thesis project, an AI platform called MARMAR, is now running in more than 100 hospitals in Nigeria and won first place at Meta's LLaMA Impact Accelerator. He says the program "gave me the foundation to build technology that actually matters." We did not set him an exam on healthcare or on machine learning. He had a real problem and built something that works in the world.

His story also points at something the transition will have to get right, which is the relationship between people and AI. The most valuable sustainability work now combines green skills with the ability to use AI well, and AI is only as good as the person directing it. The judgment about which problem to solve, which tradeoffs to accept, and where the limits and the risks lie stays stubbornly human. Education that treats AI as a thing to either ban or worship misses this entirely. What the transition needs is people who can point powerful tools at the right problems and stay accountable for the results.

 

The evidence, and its limits

 

We recently ran our first proper study of where our graduates end up, and we want to be honest about what it is: early, drawn from a single institution, and we are leaning here only on the parts we could verify independently rather than on how people rated us. Of the graduates we could check through public professional profiles, more than three quarters had changed roles since starting their studies, and around one in six had started their own business. Those ventures include impact consultancies, circular economy businesses, and AI platforms, operating across several continents.

We are not claiming this proves a model. We are saying it is consistent with what we see up close. When you build learning around real, interdisciplinary challenges, a notable number of people move into the roles where transitions are actually decided, and some leave to build the organizations the transition needs.

 

What this means if you are trying to deliver on climate

 

If you run a company with sustainability commitments, or you invest in companies that have them, the practical lesson is an uncomfortable one. The capability you need is scarce, demand is rising faster than supply, and you cannot assume you will simply hire your way out of it. A good share of it you will have to build.

Building it looks different from sending people on a generic ESG course. It means treating learning as part of the infrastructure of your transition, not an afterthought once the strategy deck is finished. It means anchoring that learning in the real problems your teams already face, a live decarbonization decision, an actual disclosure, a specific supplier relationship, so that people develop judgment they can use on Monday morning. A procurement team learns far more from being asked to cut the emissions in one real contract than from a module on scope 3. It means hiring and promoting for curiosity and the ability to learn quickly, because the regulations, the tools, and the underlying science will keep shifting under everyone. And it means giving people the confidence and the methods to direct AI rather than fear it.

The companies that build this capability inside their own walls will move through the transition faster than the ones still waiting for the perfect hire to appear.

 

The real question

 

A climate transition is not delivered by targets or by technology. It is delivered by specific people, in specific roles, making specific decisions, usually without a clean answer in front of them. Emily leading a net zero strategy she once felt unqualified to touch. Ahmad's platform running in hospitals that needed it. The serious question for anyone who cares about sustainability is not whether our ambitions are large enough. It is whether we are building the people who can meet them. That has always been the actual job of education, and it is the part we have been slowest to take seriously.

 

Christian Rebernik and Thomas Funke are the co-founders of Tomorrow University of Applied Sciences, an accredited online university focused on sustainability, technology, and business. Christian previously led technology and product at companies including N26 and founded the digital health platform Vivy; Thomas's background is in entrepreneurship and the science of how people learn.