Climate Investments for People (and Projects)
UPDATE! Just days after I wrote this piece, President Biden issued an Executive Order establishing an American Climate Corps. Details are pretty thin right now and it’s unclear if new resources will be allocated for the program, or if it’s just a repackaging of AmeriCorps. Nonetheless, it’s an important step forward in acknowledging the importance of linking workforce development for communities most impacted by climate change with other investments in climate mitigation and adaptation.
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We are undergoing one of the most radical transformations that humanity has ever seen. Billions of dollars are being invested in capital projects—renewable energy, building retrofits, electric vehicle charging stations—to address climate change. And this is just the beginning.
We must make sure that the billions of dollars that we will invest over the next decades do not go to seed because they are not maintained properly and we must monitor projects for performance so that future projects can do better.
A question that troubles me is: will we see comparable investments in human capital in the communities most affected by historic environmental harms? In other words, will we use the billions of dollars of climate investments to rectify a grim history of racial and environmental injustice? Will we focus not just on physical improvements in these communities but also on education and jobs in the climate sector? So far I am underwhelmed.
The climate transformation that we are undergoing involves at least three components: 1) overhauling our energy sector, building wind and solar and transforming transmission systems to reduce and eventually eliminate new greenhouse gas emissions; 2) making historic investments in farms, forests and oceans to draw down existing carbon out of the atmosphere and sequester it in soils, trees, and the deep seas; and 3) transforming the very physical nature of our cities and towns to protect human settlements from the current impacts—inland flooding, storm surge, extreme heat—of climate change.
All three components require billions of dollars of public investments. Recent ideas for linking this to a massive job creation program—the Green New Deal, President Biden’s Green Conservation Corps in the early versions of Build Back Better—did not materialize. Much of climate investment is funded by bonds which mean they can only go to shovel-in-the-ground type capital projects—not the kind of workforce development programs that are effective in moving folks in underserved communities into permanent living wage jobs.
We must be more ambitious. We must keep Justice as a North Star in this work. One way to do this is to invest in pipelines to the necessary maintenance and monitoring jobs to ensure that investment in climate projects are conscientiously stewarded over the long term and that we learn and adapt from the early-stage projects. We are still learning so much about what works and what doesn’t. Many climate projects, particularly those that involve nature based solutions—green infrastructure, living shorelines, oyster reefs, reforestation, modifying agricultural practices, ocean seeding—will require new jobs in both maintenance and monitoring.
Local NGOs can partner with government to provide training to folks in affected communities to develop core competencies in these emerging careers. There are examples of high quality climate workforce development programs from what Philadelphia has created with the PowerCorps projects to train local community members in maintaining green infrastructure and offering them a career pipeline into employment with the City. Here in NYC, the Wildlife Conservation Society is convening a network of NYC practitioners to explore career workforce development for STEM ecological and biological monitoring roles related to offshore wind. Also notable is the RAIN Coalition, a network of 4 NYC watershed organizations and a workforce development group that is working with NYC DEP to pilot an innovative model of GI stewardship that blends high performance with community stewardship and workforce development.
Climate change demands a major pivot of the way we live our lives on planet Earth. The necessary investments and follow-up maintenance and monitoring can also be a massive jobs project. We can channel these investments to provide low income and BIPOC households a pathway to the middle class.
