Contribute to Climate Change Without Being an Engineer
Summary
As climate change is such a complex problem, it is important to have a coordinated response across many different areas. As an engineer, your numerical skills and technical knowledge can be very valuable in other types of roles. Here are some examples of other ways to contribute your engineering skills to climate change without being an engineer.
Published: 3 May 2023 by Jessica Wen
Policy, advocacy, and leadership
Often the technologies already exist to reduce GHG emissions, and policy is the lever that would hugely accelerate the adoption of those technologies as well as behaviour change. As this article highlights, the scientific community is often not well-represented in politics, as evidenced by the fact that only 10% of elected officials in the 113th US Congress had a STEM degree, despite frequent voting on science and engineering issues.
Engineers generally have an understanding of the technical issues and workings behind these technologies, making them suited to communicate between science, industry, and government. In fact, the analytical and numerical skills could potentially be an advantage for the engineer looking to get into policy. We have written about 5 engineering skill sets that are valuable for policy.
Examples of high-leverage policy work include:
Fair policy and public research funding for a sustainable global food system, including for alternative proteins
Promotion of incentives and policy frameworks for rapid scale-up and deployment of carbon capture
As well as political advocacy, activism could also be a way to sway public opinion and politics. Even smaller-scale activist actions, such as writing to politicians, calling congressmen, or sending letters to news editors, seem quite effective in promoting change. Read more about this on Effective Environmentalism’s career advice.
Climate finance/Venture capital (VC)
BCG estimate that by 2050, a total of $150 trillion in investment capital will be needed to limit warming to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels and to reach net zero – i.e. more than $5 trillion every year until 2050. This is far greater than the current annual volume of around $1 trillion.
According to an interview with Forbes, Danijel Visevic, Co-founder of the recently launched World Fund (Europe’s biggest climatetech VC fund) says that many traditional VC funds are not adequately equipped to evaluate the potential impact and performance of climatetech startups.
This is because they lack analysts with science or engineering backgrounds who have the requisite skills to conduct in-depth technical assessments of the product or service being developed.
Grantmaking
Similarly to VC and climate finance, grantmakers at large funding organisations need analysts with science or engineering backgrounds to conduct in-depth technical assessments of the programs they fund. These could include governmental organisations like ARPA-E in the US, which funds a lot of the early-stage work into things like superhot rock geothermal, and the Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA) in the UK.
Analysts are also required in think tanks and charity evaluators, such as Founders Pledge, Let’s Fund, Giving Green, ClimateWorks, and others. Bear in mind, however, that you may not have a lot of influence depending on the foundation. Read this career profile on foundation grantmaking for more information.
Engineered for Impact: Effective climate giving with Emily Thai
Donations
Arguably, most jobs in climate aren’t all that effective, with many companies routinely exaggerating or misreporting their progress. Your efforts could be better directed towards earning to give, with your donations going towards high-impact climate charities as recommended by climate charity evaluators Giving Green or Founders Pledge. With greenwashing everywhere, these climate charity evaluators conduct hundreds of hours of research to cut through the marketing and find the most high-impact climate charities.
As a powerful example, Giving Green estimates that the Evergreen Collective has a cost-effectiveness of $4.88 per metric tonne of CO2 equivalent removed. This means that, for the cost of just $26.84 donated to the Evergreen Collective, they can remove 5.5 tonnes of CO2 equivalent emissions, which is around the same amount of CO2 emissions emitted during a return flight from London to San Francisco. This is more than twice the emissions produced by a family car in a year and about half of the average carbon footprint of someone living in Britain (BBC).
However, as Founders Pledge note, donations are not offsets. We agree that the act of donating should not be viewed as a way to offset our emissions, but rather as a means of increasing our impact further. Using offsetting as a benchmark artificially limits our ambition and potential for progress.
Effective Environmentalism Career Advice
A guide to help you find climate-related careers, engage with climate action advocacy, give you an intuition for how to make your donations have the largest impact, and much much more.
Conclusion
If you’re considering pivoting away from engineering, it might be a good idea to do a course, fellowship, or further education to get you started in your new field. The EA Opportunities board has an excellent selection of opportunities with a range of commitment levels to suit you.