At the theoretical level of this paper, the relevance of environmental literacy of specialists is substantiated. Ecology is considered as a cross-cutting topic for the sustainability of territorial development. In addition, the environmental literacy presents an important factor in ensuring the safety of processes and production results by the translation and scaling of the experience of other ecological industries. In the empirical part, the content of general professional competencies of agricultural specialties is analyzed. Moreover, a little attention is paid to environmental competence at the institutional level. A survey was conducted for 877 graduate students in the system of higher agricultural education in the south of Russia. The survey database was processed in SPSS Statistics (version 27). Future graduates of the higher agricultural education system have developed critical thinking at a high level. They successfully cope with the task of assessing the regional situation and see the environmental problems of the region. Ranking problems by degree of importance shows the most problematic areas of environmental pollution and the need to make decisions in the field of ecology. The results of the research can be used to study the sustainable regional development in more detail.