UN report: Green jobs to provide climate change silver lining

Millions of new jobs will be created through the transition to a global low-carbon economy, according to a draft report from the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) released yesterday at the Bali climate change conference.

The report, entitled Green Jobs: Can the Transition to Environmental Sustainability Spur New Kinds and Higher Levels of Employment?, argues that while many assessments of the risks associated with climate change focus on job losses and economic costs, the development of low-carbon technologies and business processes will also lead to the creation of millions of new jobs and commercial opportunities.

"Millions of new jobs are among the many silver, if not indeed gold-plated, linings on the cloud of climate change," said Achim Steiner, UN under-secretary general and executive director of UNEP. "New research reveals that these jobs are not for just the middle classes – the so-called 'green collar' jobs – but also for workers in construction, sustainable forestry and agriculture to engineering and transportation."

Speaking at the unveiling of the draft report, Janos Pasztor, a senior UNEP official, argued that the creation of green jobs would even offset job losses associated with the shift away from carbon-intensive industries. "There's every indication that there will be a net gain [in jobs] but probably not a very large net gain," he told a news conference in Bali. "The labour intensity of renewables is higher than those of fossil fuels or nuclear power."

The report, which will be formally released early next year, argues that a green jobs boom is already underway, with hundreds of thousands of jobs created in Germany and Spain as a result of the countries' renewable energy programmes, and an estimated 5.3 million environmental industry jobs created in the US during 2005 alone.

It also estimates that, based on current trends, Germany will have more jobs in the field of environmental technology than in its entire automotive sector by 2020.

However, Steiner warned that soaring green employment levels will be put at risk without greater government support for nascent clean tech industries. " Without a strong and decisive emission reductions regime, the transformational foundations being laid today could prove to be built on sand tomorrow," he said. "We need to change the subsidies, tax structures and accounting methods that permit the 'externalisation' of severe environmental impacts so they are factored into the costs of doing business on this planet."

The report comes as UN officials today admitted that it is looking increasingly unlikely that developing economies will accept binding emission reduction targets as part of any post-Kyoto agreement.

According to Reuters reports, Yvo de Boer, the UN's senior official on climate change, is sceptical that developing economies will sign up to binding targets, claiming that "binding commitments for developing countries are not off the table but are crawling towards the edge".

De Boer added that most rich nations appeared to agree it was too early to expect developing nations to cap emissions on the ground that there emissions per capita are still a fraction of those in the developed world.

However, with the US unlikely to countenance binding emission targets without similar agreements from China and India, the news will make it harder still for delegates to attain a major breakthrough as the conference moves into its second week.