Passionate About the Environment? These Programs Are For You

Pick a program to start making your impact on our little blue planet.

You are one of seven billion people who call Earth home, and if your passion for the planet goes above and beyond your own carbon footprint, you might want to begin growing a world-changing career by pursuing an Environment degree.

In Canada alone, 100,000 new environmentally-related jobs will be created between 2017 and 2024. As a country moving towards greener power, greener business, and greener practices, Canada's job market is open and ready to welcome a new generation of passionate youth who are beginning to make their own green impact.

Big plans start with small steps

You can start laying your plans for a better future by enrolling in a program such as Planning at the University of Waterloo. You'll learn about managing growing cities, designing transportation systems, protecting nature, preserving heritage, and much, much more.

If you'd rather develop insights and put yourself to the task of conserving and restoring ecosystems, you can find your calling in the Environment, Resources and Sustainability or Environmental Science programs.

Interested in impact through business?

Check out Environment and Business, the only program of its kind in North America. Sustainability is the new smart business, and students in this program will combine finance, ecology, entrepreneurship, ethics, and everything in between, both in their classrooms and their co-op experiences.

You can also help solve world problems of climate change, water scarcity, resource management, global population growth, and natural resource sustainability through the dynamics of Earth's systems, all explored in the Geography and Environmental Management program.

Develop anything from businesses to social networks with a degree in International Development. Students in this program learn how to tackle issues of economic inequality, social injustice, and environmental change, and scale their solutions to suit local or international levels.

The hands-on approach

For those who'd like to build a better world with their own hands, you can tackle the elements and engineer designs as an environmental or geological engineer to bring the environment and material world together, not apart. Between learning to clean up pollution problems and preventing future environmental ones, students have the opportunity to earn an average of $17,800 per four-month co-op term, and gaining hands-on experience in addressing global issues.

Hands-on doesn't stop there. Take to the skies in the Geography and Aviation program, which earns you a Bachelor of Environmental Studies and a Commercial Pilot Licence. Combine classroom with cockpit and learn about landforms, weather patterns and geographic information systems (GIS) as you become a pilot.

There are many more tools at your disposal than you think. Learn to use remote sensing, computer mapping, GIS, and GPS to analyze all kinds of data in Geomatics, where you can put your graduate skills to work helping governments, tracking crime, mapping businesses, or developing transportation routes.

Think outside the box

More than just a mix of arts and science, the Knowledge Integration program at Waterloo caters to students whose passions don't fit neatly into any traditional program. This degree is what you make it, and you can shape it around any and all of the topics that interest you. What you do with it is up to you.

With the insights and experiences you'll gain from enrolling in an environmental program like these, changing the environmental landscape of the world will look less like an impossible dream and more like a quantifiable, encouraging plan.

Take that first step and start your journey towards positive, global environmental change.