Featured in Bloomberg Green’s ZERO Podcast

Tackling climate change will transform the labor market. With the right policies in place, more than 24 million green jobs could be created globally by 2030, according to the International Labor Organization. But finding people to fill those roles quickly won’t be easy. One 2022 LinkedIn survey found that listings for green jobs have grown at an annual pace of 8% since 2015, while green talent grew only 6% each year over the same period. 

One bright spot: Many job seekers are now looking to work in companies aligned with climate goals. A 2021 Yale School of Management survey of 2,000 students across 29 business schools globally found that 51% would accept lower salaries to work for an environmentally responsible company. That’s a good sign, because filling the labor gap will require both new skills and people leaving their existing jobs for new and rapidly evolving industries. A reckoning is needed across the workforce, and there are some signs it’s already underway.

This year, more people were employed by clean energy companies than by fossil fuels, according to a report by the International Energy Agency. There is also a growing roster of people who are quitting their jobs to tackle climate change. To understand the difficulties they face and what lessons they’re learning, Bloomberg Green put out a call out for the stories of  “climate quitters.” We got a lot of responses, which you can hear in this week’s episode of the Zero podcast (and read in a transcript of the episode here).

Take the story of Laura Brown, whose neighborhood in Nashville, Tennessee, was wiped out by a tornado on March 3, 2020. The overall damage totaled $1.5 billion. “We were basically climate refugees during the first part of the pandemic,” she says. “And honestly, the tornado really put a fire under my butt, that climate change is sort of no longer an issue that I can ignore.”

Brown's job contract was expiring, so instead of trying to renew she went to business school, took extra classes on sustainability and then searched for a new job. It took her more than six months to land one, which she says was unexpected given how much she’d heard about the growing green economy. Many of the jobs Brown applied for required prior experience working on climate issues.

Eventually, she did get one; her advice to others seeking climate-related jobs is: “You just have to make the decision and then stick with it. We’re in this for the long haul. There's a lot of really great, profoundly empowering work to be done.”