Doing the maths on green jobs

We hear a lot about building back better and making things green. But what do the numbers tell us?

The Green Edge recently looked on as the International Monetary Fund set out to establish how green investment multipliers compare with those for non-eco-friendly energy and land use activities. The resulting paper found that there was a more than 90% probability that investments in clean energy and biodiversity conservation would generate multipliers of between 1.1 and 1.5, while for their non-eco-friendly counterparts it was more like 0.5 - 0.6. How interesting, we can almost hear you say.

But what it we could drop the analysis down a level to specific green technologies and relate them to employment generation? Well, we found something: buried deep in an appendix of this report from Cumbria we find some interesting metrics, gleaned from multiple sources. A veritable gold mine for building job estimates.

We thought it might be fun to put the metrics into the following infographic and share it, with the thought that it might be useful to anyone building green skills and employment plans at local levels (click the image to download as PDF):

Image: BMI, from data CAfS/Green House Think Tank/Opal Research and Consulting Ltd

We think it would be useful to extend and keep these metrics up-to-date, perhaps as a starting point for Skills Advisory Panels, local authorities and city regions to derive their own sets of green employment accounts. We will do our best to do this. If our readers find similarly useful studies, please feel free to let us know.

As a final point: at a more macro level, the recent technology and policy assessment by UKERC provides useful data¹ on employment created in manufacturing, construction and installation, operation and maintenance per GW of installed capacity, pulling data from seven studies conducted between 2015 and 2022. We note that there are some huge ranges for geothermal, solar PV, and small hydro investments.

---

Just one thing before you go. The Green Edge is looking for sponsors. Your sponsorship may be linked to a specific piece of content, a steer you would like to give us, or simply in recognition that we are adding value to the green skills narrative. It could be at any level, perhaps as a one-off contribution or maybe in more regular instalments. Most likely, we anticipate your sponsorship would be on behalf of your organisation. At whatever level, your support will be valued by us and will help us greatly with our plans for developing The Green Edge.

If you’d like to talk to us about sponsorship, please email us by clicking the button below. Thank you.

1. See Figs 1a) and 1b) of the report