Thank you very much.
It's my pleasure to be here to represent ECO Canada, Canada's sector council for the environment industry. We are an industry-initiated, industry-led, not-for-profit Canadian corporation with a mandate to ensure an adequate supply of people with the appropriate skills and knowledge to meet the environmental human resource needs of the public and private sectors. We believe in forming partnerships, identifying labour market issues, and then coming up with labour market solutions.
We've been in existence since 1992 and are one of the oldest sector councils in existence. We develop recruitment and retention programs for individuals and employers as well as for government—federal, provincial, municipal, and aboriginal—and educational institutions, in order to ensure that the environment sector will reach its full employment and economic potential. We have published over 50 labour market intelligence reports, and those reports are used all over Canada and are considered to be the source of environmental human resource information in Canada and in some cases worldwide. We currently have over 178,000 members in our organization, and we are very well known and respected.
You should be aware that environmental employment is a significant employer in Canada. Over two million Canadians have environmental employment to some degree. That's 12% of the workforce. Some 682,000 work in environmental employment more than 50% of the time, and that's 4% of the Canadian workforce. Over 318,000 organizations employ one or more environmental professionals. That is 17% of all organizations in Canada. We are the thread that pulls a variety of organizations together. We're in urban and rural areas, including Canada's north. With respect to employment rates prior to the economic downturn, environmental employment was growing at a 60% faster rate than employment in the general Canadian economy. Even after 2008, we are growing at average rates of 7% annually, compared with 1.5% for the Canadian economy. We're involved heavily in the STEM process—science, technology, engineering, and mathematics—and about 37% of our individuals are from that area. About 40% of our employers hired during the economic downturn, but a full one-third of them said they have difficulty finding people with the appropriate skills and knowledge.
The environment sector is going through an evolution. It's moving towards what we're referring to as the green economy, and we have to be ready for that expansion. Some 37% of all individuals in the environment sector have a university or college diploma, implying that 63% do not. We have applicability with highly skilled professionals as well as lower-skilled people. The Canadian Wind Energy Association, CanWEA, estimates that 70% of all jobs in their industry will require entry-level workers, such as skilled trades and labourers. This will also be critical in building construction, renewable energy, environmental remediation, recycling, and green manufacturing. We certainly do cover the entire gamut.
We believe in national occupational standards documenting what people do in functional areas of employment. We believe in building a common language and logic, which we currently do not have, with respect to the green economy and environmental jobs. We're working on that in partnership with a variety of other organizations.
One-third of all environmental workers today are over the age of 45. About 4% of environmental workers are already beyond retirement age. Some 14% of environmental workers will reach retirement age in the next 10 years, creating 100,000 vacancies. We have predicted that this year there will be 40,000 new environmental jobs in Canada. How are we going to fill those jobs? We're going to fill them with youth, transitioning workers, immigration, and aboriginal people. Of those individuals, 30,000 to 35,000 will come from the current post-secondary educational institutions. However, a good number are going to have to come from a variety of other activities. ECO Canada has built solutions. Those solutions are based on attracting young people to environmental careers and making them aware of the environmental activities that are going to lead the future. They are our leaders of the future. We have a green high school program that has, in one year, been in contact with over 42,000 students and teachers.
We also have a Canadian Environmental Accreditation Commission. We are actually accrediting universities and colleges across Canada, and we're the only organization in Canada to actually accredit university undergraduate and postgraduate programs. We have a Canadian Centre for Environmental Education that offers full-blown baccalaureate and master's degrees, 100% online, with no residency requirements. We are Canada's largest aboriginal trainer as well, and currently we have 466 aboriginal people working on contaminated sites cleanup in northern Canada in combination with the federal contaminated sites action plan.
We believe that the environment and the economy go hand in hand, and according to the University of Massachusetts, clean energy investments compared to fossil fuel create 2.6 times more jobs for people with college and university degrees, 3 times more jobs for people with some college, and 3.6 times more jobs for people with high school. We are going to work in partnership with a variety of organizations as we move forward. We believe that ECO Canada is an agent of change, and we will be ensuring that we're able to meet our employment and economic potential.
Thank you.