OECD countries have set ambitious climate targets to achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. Achieving these targets will have a significant impact on the labour market, with important restructuring in emission-intensive industries and new jobs being created in low-emission sectors. While these changes will open up new opportunities, they will also pose several challenges. Notably, job creation and job losses tend to be concentrated in different regions. In some instances, jobs in the expanding green activities may also not offer the same working conditions as those in shrinking emission-intensive sectors, particularly in terms of wages. Furthermore, as tasks and working methods become greener, most occupations will experience some degree of change and workers will need to reskill and upskill. To ensure that the green transition is feasible, cost-effective, fair, widely understood, and socially accepted, appropriate public policies are essential. While most OECD countries already have mechanisms in place to manage structural labour market changes, these instruments often need to be strengthened or adapted – in particular to provide stronger protection for low-skilled workers and to address the uneven impact of the transition across regions.
This report presents case studies of how selected OECD countries and regions have designed and implemented employment and skills policies for the green transition. It starts by reviewing the comprehensive strategies put in place by Austria, Canada, Flanders (Belgium), Ireland, the Netherlands, and Spain. The main findings are as follows:
The plans have different titles (“strategies”, “roadmaps”, or “action plans”), but they all include elements of strategy, planning, and implementation, and, in some cases, are embedded within legislative frameworks. These initiatives are typically led by environmental ministries, with a strong involvement of labour ministries.
While the plans differ in structure and focus, their level of details is generally quite comprehensive. All strategies place strong emphasis on upskilling, reskilling, and continuous learning. Vocational education and training systems are being adapted to incorporate skills for the green transition, and new modular, flexible training pathways are being created to support worker mobility.
Although only few strategies explicitly focus on specific groups or sectors, most prioritise support for workers in high-emission sectors who are at greater risk of job displacement. Moreover, many strategies deploy targeted support to specific geographic areas.
Broad consultations with social partners, sectoral funds, training providers, civil society and local actors, through meetings and written consultations, were central to the development of the strategies. Moreover, while the plans usually include structured implementation timelines, comprehensive monitoring and evaluation (M&E) mechanisms are still rare.
Finally, communication campaigns are used to raise awareness of job opportunities for the green transition, tackle stereotypes, and make technical and vocational paths more attractive, especially to underrepresented groups.
Beyond strategic planning, countries are also adapting specific employment and skills policies to support the green transition:
Vocational education: countries are increasingly adapting the offer of apprenticeships to support the green transition. This includes the creation of entirely new apprenticeships in emerging, green-driven occupations and the revision of existing programmes to integrate sustainability-related content – combining the addition of specific technical skills with transversal competencies like climate literacy, i.e. the understanding how the climate system works and how human actions affect it. Austria, Bulgaria and Ireland, for example, are pursuing system-wide curriculum reforms, while other countries like the United Kingdom and Sweden are focussing on sector-specific adaptations, particularly in construction, renewable energy, and transport. Bottom-up initiatives from local actors and companies (e.g. in Denmark and Bulgaria) also exist, starting as pilots and being scaled up later. Some programmes specifically target disadvantaged groups by offering accelerated pathways into jobs needed for the green transition. Financial incentives, such as subsidies for apprentices or grants for employers (e.g. in Australia), are widely used to support uptake.
Incentives to train and career guidance: to encourage workers and jobseekers to undertake training for the green transition, countries are offering financial incentives for training (such as vouchers, grants or scholarships) and improved access to labour market information and career guidance. Croatia, for instance, introduced a comprehensive voucher system for green-related training as well as tailored online and in-person career guidance to help individuals choose suitable training, ensuring alignment with labour market demands. Other approaches, like the adaptation of the general Personal Learning Account programme in Wales (United Kingdom), show how existing financial incentives can be repurposed to support the green transition, leveraging the credibility and infrastructure of established schemes.
Support for companies: several countries use short-time work (STW) arrangements to enable companies to restructure in response to climate change mitigation needs or to cope with environmental shocks (e.g. extreme weather events). Spain is a particularly interesting case with its 2021 reform which created a new type of STW scheme for sectoral transformations requiring substantial labour reallocation, including for the green transition. Other initiatives focus on helping firms, in particular small and medium enterprises (SMEs), to anticipate the impact of the green transition on their employment and skills needs. For instance, the Netherlands introduced a time‑limited subsidy programme offering financial support to SMEs adopting innovative approaches for skills development related to the energy and climate transitions.
Place‑based policies: regional policies have an important role to play to reduce geographical inequalities linked to the green transition. Examples of the Rhenish mining region in Germany and Western Macedonia in Greece show that involving regional stakeholders, conditioning funding on concrete measures, building on local assets and promoting the diversification of the local economy are key ingredients to ensure that no territories are left behind.
Despite different national contexts and objectives, some key lessons underpin the examples presented in this report and constitute best practices that countries should follow to design effective employment and skills strategies for the green transition: starting with a clear vision and long-term agenda; ensuring broad and inclusive stakeholder participation; tailoring strategies and policies to regional and sectoral specificities; establishing strong M&E frameworks; and promoting awareness and accessibility through targeted information campaigns and digital tools.
