What makes a job sustainable—both environmentally friendly and sustainable? This question is at the center of a new study by the Dukakis Center at Northeastern University School of Politics, commissioned by the City of Boston to achieve the ambitious goals of its Climate Action Plan.
The plan lays out a roadmap for the city's transition away from fossil fuels, achieving citywide carbon neutrality by 2050, and ensuring the city's resilience to a future changing climate. The project aims to decarbonize buildings, electrify the transport system, modernize the city's electrical grid and improve coastal resilience. But achieving this goal depends on people: who will do the work and how will they be trained?
“Climate plans are like jigsaw puzzles,” said Joan Fitzgerald, a professor of public policy at Northeastern University who led the study. “And the last thing that needs to be done is often workforce development.” For Boston, the final piece of the puzzle will be the release of the city report. Climate Ready Workforce Action Planwhich marks the culmination of a year-long research project conducted in partnership with the Dukakis Center along with the Burning Glass Institute, TSK Energy Solutions and Community Labor United. In addition, the plan incorporates feedback from 51 consultants, including city and state officials, training and education partners, labor partners, employer partners and community leaders.
One of the biggest challenges the researchers faced was defining “green work.” Let's take auto mechanics, for example. Repairing a gas-guzzling car may not seem like a very climate-friendly activity. But as electric vehicles become more common, they will increasingly be serviced by mechanics. (However, according to Fitzgerald, this doesn't necessarily mean there will be more mechanic jobs overall; electric vehicles have fewer parts and don't require as much maintenance.) The same is true for HVAC technicians: They might be installing a gas furnace one day, and an energy-efficient electric heat pump the next. “These examples show some confusion about what green work is,” Fitzgerald said.
To solve this problem, Northeastern used a new dataset collected Burning Glass Institutea data-driven think tank to take inventory of what jobs are needed in the green economy and what skills are needed for those jobs. “Imagine a data set of hundreds of millions of individual job postings,” said Stuart Andreason, the institute’s executive director. “We look at job postings from around the world, identify skills in them, and track how those skills are changing.”
The researchers found that while jobs like solar energy developer are certainly part of the green workforce, many existing jobs could become green with new or developing skills. Construction workers may need training in energy efficient building codes; Electricians may need to understand how to install electric vehicle chargers. As the country transitions from fossil fuels to clean energy, environmental skills are becoming essential for workers in all sectors.
Drawing on data from Burning Glass and other publicly available data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Dukakis Center Director Alicia Modestino then analyzed two key questions: How many workers will be needed for the projects and initiatives outlined in the Boston Climate Action Plan? And how many of these jobs will be filled by new workers entering the workforce or workers who need to be replaced due to projected retirements?
Despite some of these uncertainties, it is clear that cities like Boston cannot be prepared for climate change without a climate-ready workforce. “And there are a limited number of programs and places to train workers in the necessary environmental skills,” Modestino said. “The transition from entirely carbon-based jobs to those that require green skills or become fully green will be rapid… possibly creating a job shortage if cities do not get ahead of the trend.”
Analysis like this helps cities like Boston understand what jobs are growing, what skills those jobs require, and how to shape workforce training accordingly. “The challenge is forecasting demand. Is it both training new people to enter the green workforce and on-the-job training for people already in the workforce? That makes forecasting difficult,” Fitzgerald said.
In keeping with the environmental justice goals of Boston's Green New Deal, researchers examined what career opportunities exist for the city's low-income communities. These jobs run the gamut from designing and building sustainable infrastructure to community engagement.
In addition to identifying what green jobs exist, Fitzgerald's team also looked at how workers can climb the career ladder and identified where training programs fall short.
One problem: Many existing green workforce programs don't have enough funding to provide wages and support services to interns. Once the funding ends, so does your career growth. “One of our recommendations is that this is where cities can help,” Fitzgerald said. “If you have an effective training program, but it is dependent on funding that doesn’t allow you to pay the trainees, then the city can support the wages of the participants.”
Despite the challenges, Boston's Climate Ready Workforce Action Plan lays the groundwork for other cities to turn their ambitious climate goals into real, long-term job opportunities. The report is the first of its kind to link Boston's climate agenda to economic opportunity, said Oliver Sellers-Garcia, environment commissioner and director of the Green New Deal. “Our work to combat climate change will create good-paying jobs and a more inclusive workforce in Boston,” he said.
Northeastern University's School of Public Policy and Urban Affairs (School of Policy) offers master's degrees that reflect innovative, real-world research on our world's most challenging climate, environmental and sustainability issues. Through a combination of hands-on learning, interdisciplinary research, and cutting-edge coursework, these programs will prepare you for the next step in your career using policy to advance environmental and social justice in communities around the world. Study with us at our campuses in Boston, Arlington (metro DC), and Oakland.
