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Working future? Jobs and the environment (Report summary)

Working future? Jobs and the environment is a report which was published by Friends of the Earth in November 1994. Below is a summary of that report.

Contents

Summary
Pollution Control
Transport
Energy
Resource Use
Agriculture
Conclusions

 

Summary of conclusions and recommendations

Global economic development continues to cause long-term and often irreversible environmental damage as well as failing to provide sufficient jobs. Yet many of the wide and powerful interests ranged in defence of the economic status quo continue to claim that environmental protection costs jobs. This paper provides evidence to indicate that this claim is flawed. Not only does environmental protection on balance create jobs, but environmentally sustainable development is compatible with full and rewarding employment. Far from having to make hard choices between environmental destruction and the social damage associated with the misery of long-term unemployment, these twin evils can, and must, be tackled together.

In the long run the relationship between the environment and employment is clear, as one trade union put it:

"the real choice is not jobs or environment. It's both or neither. What kind of jobs will be possible in a world of depleted resources, poisoned water and foul air, a world where ozone depletion and greenhouse warming make it difficult even to survive" [1].

In the short- and medium-term too, almost all studies of the effects of environmental policies show that they lead to a net gain in jobs.

In order to get a clearer idea of the opportunities for job creation through sustainable development, sector-based case studies addressing pollution control, transport, energy, resource use and agriculture are presented below. In each case, existing research on the economic implications of environmental policies is reviewed, with particular attention to employment.

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Pollution Control

The UK Government has the opportunity to create and support jobs in the environmental control industry. By doing so it would not only be protecting the environment but exploiting the country's considerable potential for innovation. Measures to ensure that the UK industry can take its share of the growing market could provide an estimated 80,000 additional jobs in the UK by the year 2000.

If the opportunity is to be taken, the Government must reform its policies and increase its support for the industry. Environmental regulation should be strengthened and enforcement tightened, but in ways which encourage innovation. Cleaning up provides firms with economic opportunities and costs savings. Modelling suggests that properly implementing the polluter pays principle could increase employment by 200,000 by 2005, while substantial investment in water quality improvements could create almost 700,000 jobs over the same period.

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Transport

Following sustainable transport strategies can provide benefits for employment at national, regional and local levels. As road-building programmes are scrapped, measures to reduce the growth in car numbers introduced and the benefits of rail transport exploited, both private and public sectors have an opportunity to maximise potential employment benefits. A key measure to reduce car use and reduce transport emissions would be to further increase road fuel duty, above the Government's agreed increases. The substantial potential employment advantages of this policy are considered below in the discussion of tax reform.

A transformation of the transport sector, away from the strangle-hold of the 'car economy' and towards sustainability, is essential. Substantial investment in reorienting production and retraining workforces will be needed. Public expenditure should be shifted away from road-building to investments in railways and public transport that, estimates suggest, could create up to 15,700 additional jobs in 1995.

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Energy

The opportunities for employment creation through feasible and economic sustainable energy generation and use in the UK are substantial. Estimates suggest that up to 81,000 additional direct and indirect jobs could be created by energy efficiency investments which would also improve the housing conditions of the fuel-poor. Economic efficiency investments by Government and householders can be combined with increased fuel prices (a carbon tax is discussed below in the section on tax reform).

Moreover, further jobs could be created through the expansion of renewable energy sources at the expense of nuclear and coal-fired power. Estimates suggest that the UK has the potential to create up to 10,300 additional jobs in utilising on-shore wind resources, and 1,000 additional jobs in utilising solar energy, by 2005.

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Resource use

If sustainable development is to be achieved, the potential for improving resource efficiency to reduce environmental damage and create jobs must be realised. Governments need to provide the regulatory and other incentives which guide industry towards the task of innovating and operating according to the principles of resource efficiency and waste minimisation. Together governments, industry and research bodies need to do far more to find new solutions to make resource use sustainable.

The current profligate consumption of resources denies the opportunity for greater employment. The potential for job creation exists throughout the waste hierarchy. Estimates suggest that: returnable beer and soft-drinks bottles could increase UK employment by up to 4,000; if waste paper collection were to be raised to levels achieved in the Netherlands, 4,500 jobs could be created; over 4,000 jobs could be created through the recycling of waste oils and solvents; and recycling 40 per cent of domestic waste instead of landfilling it could create up to 11,500 additional jobs. Policy change to increase the costs of waste disposal and to enhance markets for recycled materials would help release this potential.

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Agriculture

Sustainable agricultural practices are more labour intensive than conventional ones. Moreover local processing of the output of farms, brings benefits for local rural economies suffering high levels of unemployment. Enhanced financial support for conversion to organic agriculture and reformed agricultural support payments could pay dividends in terms of jobs.

A feasible target of 10 per cent of production converted to organic agriculture within ten to 15 years is estimated to generate 12,000-18,000 additional jobs. In the longer term, increasing the area of lowland broadleaved woodland to begin to substitute for the UK's tropical hardwood imports could create up to 4,400 jobs over 40 years.

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Conclusion

This paper has directly addressed some of the myths traditionally surrounding the relationship between jobs and environmental protection. None of them can be justified. It is bad environmental management, not environmental regulation, which poses a greater threat to jobs in industry. The car, so long the motor for economic growth in developing countries, no longer holds the key to future development paths, despite its dominant position in most developed country economies. Strong environmental protection laws are not associated with reduced competitiveness in the global economy - in fact those countries which enact and enforce tough regulation have also generated the most dynamic and successful economies.

The need to integrate economic and environmental decision making - a key tenet of sustainable development - has been highlighted in this paper. The argument that economic growth must come first in order to afford environmental protection is an anachronism that policy makers must comprehensively reject as they confront the very real challenges of deteriorating environments and unacceptably high levels of unemployment. Yet the powerful interests ranged in defence of the economic status quo continue to drive a wedge between economic and environmental objectives. The private sector and government (at all levels) must adopt policies which have the vision and strength to reap the double benefit of environmental protection and employment gains. The policies needed are likely to lift economic development out of its current unsustainable rut onto a sustainable path and will also make the transition as smooth and efficient as possible.

Finally, this paper has exposed the lack of extensive quantified research and best practice demonstrations in most economic sectors on the employment benefits of environmental conservation and sustainable resource-use policies. Yet the existing evidence suggests there are substantial job gains to be made.

All these estimates are of additional jobs. Other assumptions are explained in the text.

* does not fully account for compensatory losses in manufacturing

There is evidence that environmental policy has already led to an increase in employment - estimated at between 8,700-17,400 in the recycling industry and over 100,000 in pollution control in the UK, and many more worldwide. While there may be other more efficient ways of creating jobs, the job-creation effect is merely a secondary benefit of the environmental policy. Moreover, the available evidence suggests that current environmental policy has resulted in far fewer jobs lost than those created.

In the future, highly conservative estimates, summarised in the table, based on empirical and modelled studies suggest that the UK economy could gain in the order of 33,000 to 78,000 additional jobs directly through environmental policy by 2005. Economic and econometric modelling suggests that substantially greater increases may arise from indirect job creation, through respending effects, for example, resulting in a total gain of over 700,000 by 2005 [2].

These gains would save money from the public purse. Each person-year of unemployment in the UK costs 9,000. If half of the new jobs were taken by currently unemployed people then the saving to the UK exchequer would be over 3.15 billion every year.

Moreover, if the policy measures used were reinforced by tax reform, recycling revenue into reduced employers' national insurance payments, the total jobs gain may be far greater, easily exceeding a million, according to one estimate. In this scenario the savings from reduced unemployment would be even greater, exceeding 4.5 billion.

Government and the private sector should seek to quantify the potential gains in more detail and investigate ways of realising that potential. If this does not occur in the UK, we will continue to miss out on employment opportunities while degrading and despoiling the natural environment we all depend on.

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Footnotes

1. Report of the Task Force on the Environment, "Our Children's World. Steelworkers and the Environment", in United Steelworkers of America, Report of the Committee on Future Directions of the Union, 25th Constitutional Convention, Toronto, Canada, August 27-31, 1990.

2. The results of econometric modelling cannot be simply added together, and this is therefore probably a very conservative estimate of the additional jobs created if investments in water quality, energy efficiency and renewable energy were pursued alongside policies to enforce the polluter pays principle.

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Note: the main report is fully referenced.