
The recent COP29 conference in Azerbaijan included a Green Zone, a forum where innovations and potential solutions for combating climate change are showcased. Green technologies and green jobs were core topics of discussion, which is sensible since the global transition to clean energy â via technologies such as solar, wind, wave, and bio power â is creating new employment opportunities all over the world.
But what exactly are green jobs? And who gets these jobs?
Social and economic analyses of new technologies â everything from technologies introduced during the Green Revolution in the 1970s, electronics in the 1980s, information technologies in the 1990s, and artificial intelligence in the 21st century â have revealed that certain groups of people gain more from using them than others.
Women, for example, are known to have weaker access to new technologies and technical jobs almost everywhere in the world, and green technologies are no exception. Women represent 32 per cent of the global clean-energy workforce and only 28 per cent of clean-energy jobs that require science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) training.
This is a problem but it is also an opportunity because the global shift to clean energy is increasing the demand for a growing array of technical, administrative, economic, policy, legal, business and entrepreneurial skills. Acute labour and skill shortages in the clean-energy sector are being reported in Canada and all over the world.
Care work is green work
Although women have yet to achieve equity in some technical occupations, they have long been the majority in fields that involve caring for people, for example in childhood education, primary education, personal support work, social work, nursing and other health-care jobs.
The care economy is already clean and sustainable when compared to employment that relies on energy-intensive and extractive sectors. Yet when most people hear the term âgreen jobâ or âlow-carbon work,â they think of activities such as installing solar panels, working on wind farms, conducting energy-efficiency audits, planting trees, or selling clean cookstoves or home solar systems.
These jobs are important and will help mitigate the climate crisis. But caring for people is also green work. In terms of greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs) alone, the care industry is 30-per-cent less polluting than the construction sector. The education industry is even more green: 62 per cent less polluting than construction.
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On average, jobs in manufacturing produce 26 times more GHGs than jobs in health care. (Jobs in fossil fuels produce 1,500 times more GHGs than those in health care.)Â
And because the care industry is more labour-intensive than energy-intensive sectors like construction or manufacturing, an investment in the care sector could create 2.7 times as many jobs as the same investment would generate in energy-intensive industries.
Reimagining green work
COVID-19 pulled back the curtain on a global care crisis and led to calls for comprehensive reforms of sectors such as elder care, long-term care, home care, and child care. The pandemic also highlighted the need for higher wages, more secure employment, paid sick leave, affordable child care, housing assistance, and student-debt relief for those who perform care work.
The global climate crisis and COVID-19 have together demonstrated the need for steering our economy away from sectors focused on producing more things for us to consume and discard, and toward sectors that will help provide care and enable wellbeing for all. Investing more heavily and creating more jobs in the care sector would both address the global care crisis and offer meaningful livelihoods for millions of people, including those displaced by industries reliant on fossil fuels.
Of course, investing more heavily in care work should not distract us from the fact that we also need more jobs and employment equity in fields that are more commonly thought of as green, for example in clean energy, energy-efficiency technology, low-carbon manufacturing and construction, and forestry. Jobs in these fields tend to be well paid and stable; we must make every effort to ensure that they attract and retain a more diverse workforce than they do.
We must also be motivated to address how undervalued and underpaid care work is despite being vital for societal wellbeing.
Recognizing paid and unpaid care work
Instead of thinking of green jobs simply as work that reduces GHGs, we need to think of green jobs as work that protects and nurtures human and ecological wellbeing. Creating more opportunities in caring professions and improving wages and working conditions would lead to better outcomes for people and for the planet. It could also provide meaningful livelihoods for workers leaving industries that need to shrink or wind down altogether because of their climate impact.
Broadening the definition of green jobs to include care work might also lead to care work receiving the levels of policy attention and funding that clean-energy technologies enjoy. And if paid care work receives more policy attention and priority, the unpaid care work and volunteer labour that is crucial for sustaining families, communities and society at large may also garner more respect and reward than it does.
Simply put, we should create green jobs in sectors that are energy intensive, but we should also recognize, reward, and expand work in caring professions â since they are already green.