Decent Work in Nature-based Solutions 2024: Unlocking jobs through investment in skills and nature-based infrastructure
Currently, over 60 million people worldwide work in Nature-based Solutions (NbS), which are actions to protect, conserve, restore, sustainably use and manage natural or modified terrestrial, freshwater, coastal and marine ecosystems.
Building on the Decent Work in Nature-based Solutions 2022 report, Cambridge Econometrics in collaboration with the ILO, IUCN and UNEP have published a new updated and improved version of the 2022 report looking at not only the number of current and future jobs linked to NbS but also the quality of these jobs. The report explores how improving the quality of jobs can enhance the effectiveness of NbS, and vice versa. The Decent Work in Nature-based Solutions series of reports aim to both deepen understanding of the role NbS play in the world of work and to guide global, regional, and national policies that promote decent work, while fostering environmentally sustainable and inclusive economies and societies.
Our Approach
Using our in-house macroeconomic model E3ME, we provided updated estimates of current and future global employment in NbS, building on the economic modelling approaches used in the 2022 report.
This second iteration of the modelling analyses, incorporated various improvements to enhance the accuracy of estimates of employment in NbS as well as to increase the level of detail in the results. These improvements included greater NbS activity- and regional- specificity in the results, and results broken down by occupations, age and gender and more granular global regions.
Key findings:
- Current global NbS employment: Over 60 million people are currently involved in NbS employment worldwide, including work directly tied to NbS, jobs generated in associated supply chain sectors, or work created by increased economic activity from NbS initiatives. A substantial proportion of the NbS workforce (more than 90 per cent) is in Asia and the Pacific, particularly in lower-middle-income countries.
- Benefiting women and youth: A substantial share of NbS employment currently benefits women and youth. The share of youth among people engaged in NbS employment tends to be larger than their share in total employment in several regions, particularly in Africa and Latin America. The share of women in NbS is slightly lower than the female share in total employment globally, perhaps reflecting the type and manual nature of a lot of the work performed. Nonetheless, more than one-third of NbS workers globally are women.
- Future job creation: If NbS expenditure triples by 2030, in line with the investment required to achieve key global targets related to the three Rio Conventions on biodiversity, climate change and desertification, up to an additional 32 million people could be employed in NbS-related activities. Driven by investment needs, a large share of global employment in NbS-related work takes place in Africa, Latin America and Arab States.
- Future skills needs: In the future, there is likely to be an important shift in the composition of occupations involved and skills required to carry out NbS-related work. The analysis shows that there is a general upward shift of the skill levels required, which generally implies an improvement of the quality of NbS jobs.