Youthquake meets green economy

Meet Gen Green

As companies accelerate their transition to the green economy, attracting young talent is a new imperative. While good pay, stability and opportunity continue to be motivators, young people are also looking for companies that offer attractive green jobs and demonstrate real commitment toward environment sustainability.

The idea of creating a better future has mass appeal to young people across the globe, but young people in Asia Pacific (APAC) are particularly eager. Findings from our new research report show how young people in APAC have strikingly higher levels of aspiration to work in the green economy as compared to the US and Europe. The young in APAC are also confident of realizing their goal in 10 years—or even five.

Youth in APAC aspire to work in the green economy and solve some of the world’s biggest environmental challenges. Whether it’s helping economies transition to cleaner transportation or helping the region decarbonize, they’re in it for the long haul. There’s just one problem: Many of these green jobs don’t exist yet.

Turning the green vision into reality

Just how many green jobs will be available for APAC’s aspiring young people? Focusing on five countries in the region—Australia, China, India, Indonesia and Japan—we modeled the number of green jobs expected to be created by 2030. We found that 32.6 million green jobs could be created over the next seven years, in those five countries.

According to our model, more than 12 million are expected in the area of transportation—for example, adding charging stations for electric cars or building out urban rail networks. Almost 10 million more will come from increasing the supply of low-carbon electricity, especially in the form of renewable energy.

Although 32.6 million green jobs in less than 10 years sounds impressive, this number still falls short of the high demand from the region’s 665 million young people (aged 15-39 years) active in the labor force in 2020.

Three imperatives for companies

As the demand for—and supply of—green jobs continues to grow, what do companies need to do? Many have started by making public commitments to sustainability. Now they have to execute, and that means they need talent, and often new forms of talent. A high degree of determination in this area will be critical to those that want to lead in the green economy.

We identified three imperatives for companies in APAC to attract young people.

Putting green economy on the CXO agenda

To care about what young people want is to care about your company’s future. Business leaders need to ask themselves three key questions as they pursue a place in the green economy:

• What are we doing to ensure our actions do not run the risk of “greenwashing?”
• How will we tangibly measure our non-financial performance (i.e., environmental, social, governance and other dimensions)?
• How will we create new “green collar” jobs needed to attract aspiring young people? And how will we ensure our existing talent can succeed in the green economy of the future?

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