Will a shortage of green skills scupper the UK’s net-zero plans?

Green deals around the world will remain stuck on amber as long as nations lack the skills to deliv­er a low-car­bon econ­o­my. There sim­ply aren’t enough sci­en­tists, engi­neers, ESG experts and change-man­age­ment spe­cial­ists to go round. If min­is­ters and busi­ness lead­ers don’t address the skills gap with retrain­ing today, key nation­al cli­mate tar­gets will not be met tomor­row.

The num­bers are stark. Accord­ing to an esti­mate by the Inter­na­tion­al Ener­gy Agency in June, 14 mil­lion jobs (includ­ing 117,000 in the UK) will have to be filled before the end of this decade mere­ly to ser­vice the world’s grow­ing green ener­gy infra­struc­ture. Across the UK econ­o­my, 6.3 mil­lion jobs could be affect­ed by the nation­al push for car­bon neu­tral­i­ty, requir­ing their hold­ers to acquire new skills. The gov­ern­ment con­vened the Green Jobs Task­force late last year to con­sid­er whether the country’s zero-car­bon ambi­tions are achiev­able, giv­en the scale of the train­ing task. 

Esin Serin is a pol­i­cy ana­lyst at the Grantham Research Insti­tute on Cli­mate Change and the Envi­ron­ment, a unit of the Lon­don School of Eco­nom­ics. She observes that “match­ing the speed of the work­force tran­si­tion with the urgency of invest­ments in tech­nol­o­gy and infra­struc­ture is a huge chal­lenge”.

The UK’s biggest skills short­ages are in sci­ence, tech­nol­o­gy, engi­neer­ing and maths – and there sim­ply aren’t enough STEM grad­u­ates in the pipeline. They are bad­ly need­ed in sec­tors such as ener­gy gen­er­a­tion and car man­u­fac­tur­ing. But oth­er skills and indus­tries are com­ing to the fore too, as many more sec­tors seek to decar­bonise.   

Nick Mol­ho is exec­u­tive direc­tor at the Alder­s­gate Group, a mul­ti-stake­hold­er alliance aim­ing to achieve an envi­ron­men­tal­ly sus­tain­able econ­o­my. He notes that “tran­si­tion­ing busi­ness­es are increas­ing­ly seek­ing can­di­dates with soft skills in areas such as project man­age­ment and com­mu­ni­ca­tion. These are crit­i­cal, as many solu­tions to reduce emis­sions require dif­fer­ent sec­tors to col­lab­o­rate on com­plex ini­tia­tives. For instance, waste-man­age­ment com­pa­ny Suez and cement pro­duc­er Cemex have devel­oped a new low-car­bon fuel, which is derived from the house­hold and busi­ness waste that Suez col­lects. Cemex is using it to replace fos­sil fuels in its pro­duc­tion plants.” 

There are calls among envi­ron­men­tal experts and pol­i­cy advis­ers for a com­pre­hen­sive low-car­bon skills strat­e­gy to match the ambi­tions of gov­ern­ment and indus­try. At present, the focus is on the num­ber of new green jobs that will be cre­at­ed. But these will not be filled unless soci­ety can adapt, reskill and sup­port these roles. There is also a need to draw on a diverse pool of can­di­dates from dif­fer­ent back­grounds.    

“The HGV dri­ver crunch we’re fac­ing in the wake of the Covid cri­sis and Brex­it will be just a pre­view of what’s to come if we don’t sub­stan­tial­ly increase sup­port for train­ing pro­grammes,” warns Andrew Sud­mant, a research fel­low in the Cen­tre for Cli­mate Change Eco­nom­ics and Pol­i­cy at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Leeds. “To shift all of the UK’s homes to more sus­tain­able heat­ing sys­tems by 2050, for instance, we’d need to retro­fit one home every 25 sec­onds. We def­i­nite­ly need to boost the num­ber of work­ers with spe­cif­ic skill sets.”

Many large busi­ness­es in the UK and beyond that are com­mit­ted to net-zero goals have been cre­at­ing online knowl­edge hubs and oth­er edu­ca­tion­al tools, as well as embed­ding sus­tain­abil­i­ty prin­ci­ples into their oper­a­tions. This is hap­pen­ing in indus­tries rang­ing from finan­cial ser­vices to food and bev­er­ages. But there is no doubt that sig­nif­i­cant invest­ments are need­ed if the nee­dle on the skills dial is to be shift­ed at any kind of speed. 

“Upskilling more than 2,400 of our farmer-own­ers and 3,000 col­leagues across the coun­try is dif­fi­cult for us, espe­cial­ly giv­en the pace of devel­op­ment in sus­tain­abil­i­ty,” admits Ash Ami­rah­ma­di, MD of Arla Foods UK. “The most impor­tant thing for us to acknowl­edge is that our com­pa­ny doesn’t have all the answers – although I don’t think any­one does.”

He con­tin­ues: “We’re acute­ly aware that each pound we spend as a com­pa­ny reduces the amount of mon­ey returned to the farm­ers who own it. It’s a sim­i­lar sit­u­a­tion for many busi­ness lead­ers at the moment: the longer-term pay-off ver­sus the short-term need. Sus­tain­abil­i­ty has height­ened the need for that bal­ance. This requires a change in mind­set from col­leagues – one that we’re work­ing through togeth­er.”

The government’s so-called lev­el­ling-up agen­da could at least help to equip work­ers in cer­tain regions for a future beyond car­bon-inten­sive indus­tries. The Grantham Research Insti­tute on Cli­mate Change and the Envi­ron­ment has found that some of the nation’s most deprived areas have a high pro­por­tion of jobs that will be affect­ed by the tran­si­tion to a low-car­bon econ­o­my. Sec­tors and loca­tions in which jobs are par­tic­u­lar­ly at risk are also where skills are in demand. This could be an oppor­tu­ni­ty in dis­guise, accord­ing to Mol­ho.

“The decar­bon­i­sa­tion of some of the UK’s heavy indus­tri­al sites could lead to the cre­ation of com­pet­i­tive low-car­bon indus­tri­al hubs in areas such as south Wales, Teesside and Mersey­side,” he pre­dicts. “We’ve already seen the off­shore wind indus­try cre­at­ing jobs in dif­fer­ent parts of north­ern Eng­land, for instance. About one-third of engi­neers in this sec­tor have come from the North Sea oil and gas indus­try.”

One thing’s for sure: doing lit­tle the close the skills gap cer­tain­ly isn’t an option for the gov­ern­ment. If a sig­nif­i­cant num­ber of work­ers, espe­cial­ly in mar­gin­al con­stituen­cies, were to sud­den­ly find them­selves unem­ploy­able, that would not make them hap­py vot­ers.