The Green Edge Reports Awards 2022
OK, so we’re not actually giving away awards, but these are our top nine reports of 2022 anyway. Part Two of The Green Edge’s roundup of the year.
The Green Edge continuously reviews reports, projects and data sources, and we feature those that catch our eye in our monthly Reports Roundup. During 2022 we’ve featured around 250 from a total of nearly one thousand received. Here we share the nine we feel should stand the test of time and contribute in a significant way to our understanding of green skills, green jobs, their importance to the economy and – perhaps most importantly – their contribution to delivering Net Zero at local and national levels.
In compiling our list, we’ve tended to look for those that cut across the whole green economy. One exception, because of its immediate importance, is heat pumps, although we do note we’ve read some other excellent reports during the year on topics like cement, steel, batteries, hydrogen, steel, EVs and the like. We should also name a few organisations we go back to time and time again for green skills insights: Rocky Mountain Institute, Nesta, Lightcast (the new name for Burning Glass & EMSI), The Data City, RAND Europe, Warwick Institute for Employment Research (IER), Resolution Foundation, The Institute for Employment Studies (IES), The Climate Change Committee (CCC), McKinsey, and BloombergNEF. There are others, but we feel these are worthy of particular mention.
With that and in no particular order, we present The Green Edge’s top reports of 2022.
Sussex Local Skills Improvement Plan
Sussex Chamber of Commerce with Nesta, March 2022
We start with the local skills improvement plans because we feel it’s vital to connect local skill demands with local education and training supply. LSIPs, if done properly, should enable this to happen.
This trailblazer LSIP for Sussex is, we feel, one which could easily provide the template for others in terms of its rigour, depth of analysis, use of data and overall presentation. For the LSIP, the Sussex Chamber of Commerce teamed up with Nesta to use publicly available data from jobs postings to build a tailored set of skills profiles to link local skills demand and supply.
We look forward to seeing further LSIP’s emerge during 2023, hopefully matching the standard set by Sussex.
Green Jobs in Scotland: An inclusive approach to definition, measurement, and analysis
IER Warwick University and Strathclyde University for Skills Development Scotland, November 2022.
Image: SDS
If the UK is going to properly develop, implement and evaluate policies to deliver the green skills to hit net zero, we believe it’s vitally important to define and enumerate green jobs, and to build a green skills taxonomy. We were therefore very glad to receive this report, which helps to chart how we might go about this.
The report has three important objectives: first, to define green jobs (we note that ONS is now picking up on this for the whole of the UK); second, to measure them and show where they exist right now; and third, to start to build a taxonomy fit for our Net Zero future. For the UK to make progress it must be able to define green jobs and skills, and then track them to shape policy and monitor its impact.
We hope this initial work for Skills Development Scotland will lead to a dataset which is refreshed and extended to provide job content and skills information to support the provision of green elements in education and training. Again, a model that other parts of the UK could easily adopt and develop.
Green Jobs and Skills Development for Disadvantaged Groups
RAND Europe, October 2022.
We include this report in our list because we strongly believe that green job opportunities must be open to all. We therefore found this multi-country / multi-city study to be a timely reminder of the ‘good green jobs for all’ mantra. The report describes the access issues to green jobs and the interventions that have been tried to minimise and remove the negative barriers often seen in an emerging set of occupations. We hope the UK’s labour market watchers will monitor and correct any potential market failures before barriers become too entrenched.
How to scale a highly skilled heat pump industry
Nesta. July 2022
The only technology-specific item on our list, we include this one because heat pumps have an immediate part to play in decarbonising domestic properties. This report shows how we could develop a skilled workforce to deliver heat pumps in the numbers the Climate Change Committee says are needed.
We found this report refreshing in that it looks at the skills and manpower implications of the total task of retrofitting domestic properties and, as such, we feel it provides a model for other core green technologies. Further, if this study were to be repeated across the other technologies, the collective outputs could provide the big picture of the UK’s skills demand. Once that’s known, the challenge will then be to source the supply of new entrants and find ways of raising the effectiveness and productivity of green education and technologies.
UK Green Skills Report
LinkedIn, March 2022
Image: LinkedIn
We talked earlier about the need for a commonly-accepted taxonomy of green skills and jobs. Given that this isn’t done yet, online job postings on self-declared data portals can be useful. Reports based on the resulting data can bring challenges in interpretation but they do represent a large sample of current jobs and employees, to be used (albeit with care) in tracking career entry and progression into new occupations and new parts of the labour market.
This report is just a snapshot but, we feel, is one worth repeating and could in time be used alongside other national data sources from the likes of ONS, NOMIS, Lightcast and Nesta.
State of the Profession 2022
Green Biz and Weinreb, November 2022
There’s little doubt a key new green occupation is that of the Chief Sustainability Officer (CSO). CSOs shape and lead corporate decarbonisation programmes and it’s important to understand the health and development of the role. This report contributes significantly to that understanding.
We’ve written recently on The Green Edge about sustainability careers and we feel this report is useful for people considering one. While the report is US-centric, we think it would be good to see it repeated across the world regions, perhaps even down to individual country levels.
Net Zero Jobs: The impact of the transition to net zero on the UK labour market.
Resolution Foundation, June 2022.
We believe it’s vital to have a joined-up view of the labour market and its response to delivering Net Zero. This includes geographies and we found this report to be one of the few truly national studies looking at green skills, jobs and places. The analysis by the Resolution Foundation is an excellent start and we think it should be extended and updated on a regular basis. It would also be good to see this approach being used in the LSIPs, and for the datasets used to be made widely available.
Skills needs in selected occupations over the next 5-10 years
RAND Europe. April 2022/August 2022
Another report from RAND Europe, this time commissioned by DfE. We include it because it charts the overlap between green and digital skills and occupations. A deep dive like this into emerging and core occupations is largely qualitative, but we believe it’s needed to provide insights into the new roles. This report does it well.
It's interesting to note that the report makes a key distinction between ‘green’ and ‘sustainability’ skills. It also describes the overlaps (as we might expect) between core and future labour market skill sets like computational thinking, digital skills (including visualisation), data analytical capabilities, and so on. It makes the point that green skills are built on a foundation of digital, engineering, science, operational and strategic, and data analytical skills.
Teasing out the foundational skills set for the green economy is vital if we are to reshape curriculum at all levels of education and training.
Independent Assessment: The UK’s heat and building strategy.
Climate Change Committee, March 2022
The Climate Change Committee is a critical part of the UK’s Net Zero delivery and, under Lord Deben’s chairmanship, The Green Edge holds it in high regard. Its annual review and deep dives into the decarbonisation of core sectors are essential reading to inform policy development.
This is another example of the Committee’s excellent work and we recommend to read it alongside the Nesta report on heat pumps (see above). It provides clarity of the task ahead and uses a good framework into which specific green skills can be placed and built.
We now need a series of joint research projects that can inform national and local green skills thinking. Ideally, it would be good to see some multi-member research groups formed to pool expertise and data, and to devise practical green skills plans for the delivery of our Net Zero future.
Green Jobs Barometer. Monitoring a fair transition to a green economy.
PwC, December 2022
One of the few annual review of progress on the green jobs front and provides a national and regional perspective for the UK. It will be interesting to see how the figures for 2023 look when we have a set of data from the ONS and potentially the start of the LSIP development work across England.
We hope you found our list of Report of 2022 interesting and thought provoking. We’d love to hear from you about which reports have helped you towards your transition to Net Zero.
Best wishes for the holiday season. Let’s see what we find in 2023!