A critical question facing the geosciences is ‘Who will be the geoscientists in the future to address the challenging societal questions that all nations face?'  For the last few decades, geosciences have faced a crisis in student interest in the geosciences.  There are many causes, including perceptions relative to the rigor of the geosciences, concern about long-term employment opportunities, and a general lack of interest in science and mathematics.  At the same time, there is a generational shift in the geoscience workforce.  In the developed world, the baby boomer generation is leaving

The great demographic shift underway in many developed nations is impacting the geosciences extraordinarily hard.  We examine the situation in the United States as an example of how there are four clear overarching issues to establishing a sustainable geosciences workforce: Carrying Capacity of the Educational Sector, the fundamentals of meeting future demand, the issue of graduate quality, and the emerging challenge of sustaining the capacity building of future geoscientist generations.  The United States currently hosts about half of all geoscientists globally and is facing the imminent,

With the economic malaise in the United States, colleges and universities are assessing the impact of academic programs related to their overall mission and constituency. Geoscience departments are facing pressure to demonstrate the return on investment of their educational program provides. The metrics of these inquiries are variable, but usually center on the employment of graduates; often from partial data gathered by alumni offices. Many departments do not have structured longitudinal tracking of their graduates, thus limiting the extent of their supporting information.

The United States, based on prior IUGS estimates, currently has 50% of all working geoscientists resident and continues to educate about 50% of all new geosciences graduate degree recipients globally.   Demographic and cultural trends in the United States, like most western nations, point to both mid and long-term supply problems for the science and engineering workforce, and those economies will be increasingly dependent on talent from developing nations and an increasingly transnational workforce.    The geosciences is a broad discipline that is inherently interdisciplinary, and therefore

The International Union of Geological Sciences, with endorsement by UNESCO, has established a taskforce on global geosciences workforce and has tasked the American Geological Institute to take a lead. Springing from a session on global geosciences at the IGC33 in Oslo, Norway, the taskforce is to address three issues on a global scale: define the geosciences, determine the producers and consumers of geoscientists, and frame the understandings to propose pathways towards improved global capacity building in the geosciences.