Countries will need to equip their workforce for the transition to a low-carbon economy. Copyright: Shutterstock
Countries can fight climate change and build a foundation for sustainable growth, but that requires equipping their workforce for the transition to a low-carbon economy. Until now, however, we’ve known little about the skills required for green jobs in low-and middle-income countries.
Indonesia has made strong commitments to transition to a greener, more resilient, and inclusive development. Estimates by the Government of Indonesia suggest that greening the economy would help the country jump into a more sustained growth path and increase the annual GDP growth rate by as much as 2 percentage points. This more sustainable growth trajectory would lead in turn to better employment outcomes and significantly reduced poverty and inequality by 2045. To realize this potential, it is crucial to equip the workforce with the skills necessary for the green transition.
Forecasting green job opportunities in different countries
To support the government’s commitment, the World Bank developed a new methodology for developing countries to predict jobs and skills affected by the transition to a greener economy. This approach allows countries to contextualize green jobs for their specific economies and addresses potential biases from importing the list of green jobs from high-income countries. These biases may arise because developing countries have not yet adopted the polluting technologies used in high-income countries or because some industries are undergoing a slower greening process.
This work was implemented through the Jobs after Covid Innovation Challenge, an initiative launched by the Jobs Umbrella Multi-Donor Trust Fund in 2021 to explore and scale innovative solutions to job-related problems. World Bank teams and partners in countries including Indonesia, South Africa, Vietnam, and India are now using this new green jobs and skills approach, as well as development organizations such as the International Labour Organization and the German Development Cooperation.
From a dictionary of green tasks to green skills in Indonesia
As a first step to understand which jobs require green skills training, the World Bank team needed to determine which jobs involve green tasks, or activities that improve a firm’s environmental footprint. The team identified green tasks by creating a dictionary of green terms to capture words that relate to the environment in an occupational database containing task statements. Based on this analysis, the team developed an organizational framework to help users choose the right method to identify green jobs depending on their policy questions and data availability, which provided the foundation for the new methodology tailored for skill needs in Indonesia. The toolkit, including the dictionary and a detailed step-by-step guide to replicating the methodology, is publicly available and can be adjusted for different data sources.
This methodology to identify green occupations served as a cornerstone for the design of the Skills for Energy Transition Survey, a pilot tool to contextualize green skills in Indonesia and capture occupational changes in coal and non-coal sectors in selected regions. The government of Indonesia will use data from the survey to assess reskilling and upskilling needs during the energy transition.
Impacting policy and practice
A wide range of partners in Indonesia are using the new methodology:
- The Indonesian Ministry of National Development Planning employed the technique for its definition of green jobs in recent regulations and its Roadmap for Green Jobs.
- Indonesia's National Bureau of Statistics and Ministry of National Development Planning expect to use the approach to track achievement of green job goals in the upcoming 2025-2029 National Medium Term Development Plan.
- The approach is also integral to the Labor Market Information and Skills System Transformation for Labor Market Flexibility project in Indonesia, which will further operationalize the method by tagging green jobs and identifying associated green skill needs.
A green way forward in Indonesia and beyond
As Indonesia moves forward with its green agenda, these new methodologies and tools will play a pivotal role in shaping a sustainable and resilient future for its workforce. The World Bank is also developing an additional toolkit to identify skilling and re-employment pathways for brown sector workers whose jobs are disappearing. In addition to these innovations for Indonesia, the toolkit could be easily replicated in any country relying on an occupational classification system with task statements, offering a valuable resource for policy makers and researchers worldwide.
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