Nature based solutions can create 20 million new job opportunities

Present society is facing multiple challenges including climate change, disaster risk, and food and water insecurity. These challenges can be addressed by harnessing the power of nature. In doing so, we can create twenty million new jobs for the world.

The International Labor Organization (ILO), the UN Environment Program (UNEP), and the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) released a new report explaining how supporting Nature-based Solutions (NbS) can create a large number of job opportunities. The impact of this will be felt more by those dwelling in rural areas.

The report was titled, “Decent Work in Nature-based Solutions,” and was launched at the UN's Biodiversity Conference, COP15. The writers put emphasis on the need for a “Just transition” that leaves no one behind while creating meaningful job opportunities. According to the UN Environment Assembly resolution 5/5, nature-based solutions are, “actions to protect, conserve, restore, sustainably use and manage natural or modified terrestrial, freshwater, coastal and marine ecosystems which address social, economic and environmental challenges effectively and adaptively, while simultaneously providing human well-being, ecosystem services, resilience and biodiversity benefits.”

NbS currently employs almost 75 million workers. 96% of those employees are from lower-middle-income nations in Asia and the Pacific. However, the majority of global NbS expenditure is in high-income countries. Most of these jobs are part-time jobs. These numbers don’t pay justice to the number of job losses that occur when NbS are implemented.

A vast majority, 98 – 99% of all NbS work in low-income and lower-middle-income countries are in the agriculture and forestry industries. In upper-middle-income countries, this figure falls to 42% and in high-income countries, it dips even lower to 25%. Where agricultural productivity is high in industrialized nations, the major areas of NbS spending are ecosystem restoration and natural resource management. In high-income countries, public services take up a bulk of the NbS work share at 37%, while construction constitutes 14%.

If the investments in NbS are tripled by the year 2030, we can create 20 million additional jobs all over the world. This will contribute greatly toward achieving the biodiversity, land restoration, and climate goals mentioned in the United Nations’ State of Finance for Nature 2021 Report. But the report states that there is still no guarantee of meeting the ILO standards for green jobs via NbS jobs. To be considered such a job, it has to be in the environmental sector, meet the standards for decent work, and be in line with international and national labor standards.

Vic van Vuuren, Director of the ILO Enterprises Department, says that we must scale up the use of NbS solutions. In doing so, we must not scale up decent work deficits, such as informal work. “The ILO’s Just Transition Guidelines provide a framework to help us do this.” “Just transition” policies that need to be established to mitigate risks will have to include factors such as:

• Job placement services
• Public employment programs
• Re-employment training
• Access to unemployment benefits
• Early retirement
• The use of and payment for ecosystem services (PES) programs