Dr. Debra Rowe
President of the U.S. Partnership for Education for Sustainable Development
Dr. Debra Rowe has spent her career encouraging people to step beyond their job descriptions to help fix systemic problems and create a more sustainable future. She started and currently chairs two action groups for the Higher Education Sustainability Initiative (HESI): Education for Green Jobs and the SDG Publishers Compact Fellows program. Through these groups, she has convened and catalyzed actions for sustainability among publishers, researchers, accreditation agencies, academic societies, educators and policymakers. More than twenty years ago she co-founded with AASHE, and still co-facilitates, networks of over sixty national higher education and technical education associations for sustainability, including academic societies, planning and operations associations, and higher education leadership associations.
Debra models how we can all nurture and nudge people to scale up actions for a better world. She invites leaders and staff of mainstream organizations to discuss their unique and important roles, empowers them, and nudges them to create systemic changes for a more sustainable future. She convenes and nurtures multi-stakeholder coalitions, and facilitates actions for: climate mitigation and adaptation; just transitions to clean energy and sustainable economies; and the Sustainable Development Goals. As one example, she nudged the Clean Energy Ministerial’s (CEM) Empowering People Initiative to focus on workforce development, then assisted with the design and moderated a Solutions Summits series and authored a toolkit about how to create a greener economy with a prepared clean energy workforce development system. After the series, she created a virtual international support community to increase the rate and quality of implementation.
Before teaching full-time, Dr. Rowe owned retail and wholesale solar and energy efficiency companies. Starting in 1980, she taught renewable energies, energy management, sustainable development, psychology and related topics to students at Oakland Community College for forty-two years, and taught campus and corporate sustainability at the University of Vermont. Working to scale sustainability efforts, she consulted with over 100 colleges and universities, helping them start and grow their energy efficiency, renewable energies and sustainability programs. When working with higher education institutions, she invited the local government, NGOs and business associations to co-create their plans and actions for sustainability.
Debra helped design and co-organized the National Clean Energy Workforce Alliance. She worked via the National Council for Workforce Education to convene authors to update design, HVAC, renewable energies, construction and related degree materials and textbooks with clean energy curricula. She’s received numerous awards, including an energy education award at MIT from CEM (C3E). She co-authored the UNEP Global Guidance on Education for Green Jobs and has numerous publications. Still working closely with sub-national governments through ICLEI: Local Governments for Sustainability. and business associations, Debra supports multi-sectoral progress.
She mentors the U.S. Partnership’s youth coalition of National Climate Fellows, composed of over 100 student groups and allied organizations, which seeks to hold accountable companies, trade associations and elected officials for their roles in environmental and social responsibility; educate key constituents and the public about healthy economic structures for a sustainable future; provide a How to Be a Changemaker certificate and open source modules for educators; convene authors of textbooks related to engineering to include sustainability concepts and skill-building; and advocate for equitable clean energy and climate solutions.