Is the green transition worth it? Only to skilled workers. Bank of Italy report
The ecological transition should guarantee around 120,000 job positions by 2025. But the most highly qualified professions will benefit above all. What the Bank of Italy says
(Excerpt from the 2022 annual report of the Bank of Italy)
The structural transformations necessary to reduce climate-altering gas emissions, the main European and Italian objective for the green transition, will involve a recomposition of employment between production sectors and between types of professional figures, also requiring new skills.
WHAT EUROSTAT AND ISTAT DATA SAY
According to the environmental accounts, published by Eurostat and Istat with a delay of about two years from the reference period, between 2011 and 2021 the amount of emissions per full-time equivalent employee generated by economic activities decreased by a relatively similar amount in all major European countries (figure A, panel a). In Italy this improvement is attributable to greater efficiency, also in the sectors with the highest emissions, mainly due to the use of less polluting energy sources; the reallocation of the share of employed people towards sectors with a lower carbon footprint contributed to a very limited extent (figure A, panel b). In the sectors where the decline in emissions was greatest, growth in the employment of specialists in scientific and IT professions was observed that was slightly higher than that of the rest of the economy.
EMPLOYEES IN ENVIRONMENTAL SERVICES
The share of people employed in the production of environmental goods and services specifically aimed at reducing emissions is still low: in the four main euro area countries it was below 2 per cent in 2020 and only slightly higher than in 2014. Even in these activities, in Italy the number of highly qualified scientific and engineering job positions rose more than in the rest of the economy. The ecological transition would therefore appear to have been associated, on the whole, with a recomposition of employment mainly in favor of the more qualified professions.
EMPLOYMENT IN THE ECOLOGICAL TRANSITION, ACCORDING TO THE PNRR
The need to abate climate-altering gases generated by production processes will increase significantly in the next few years, in order to reach the EU goal of zero climate impact by 2050, with further repercussions on labor demand.
Public investment will provide a potentially significant boost to the ecological transition; the PNRR, to be implemented in the period 2021-26, allocates 37.5 per cent of the total resources to this purpose. It is estimated that in 2025, the year of maximum spending, the Plan would activate around 120,000 full-time job positions limited to projects with green objectives, provided that they are all completed within the set deadlines; about 51,000 of these positions would be attributable to measures for which an objective of reducing climate-altering emissions is explicitly indicated in the Plan.
The greatest activations would take place above all in the construction sector for interventions in the field of infrastructure for sustainable mobility and the redevelopment of the housing stock. Employment, compared to the pre-pandemic level, would also increase in other sectors, such as research and development, manufacturing of means of transport other than motor vehicles and computer programming (figure B).
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/economia/la-transizione-verde-conviene-solo-ai-lavoratori-qualificati-report-bankitalia/ on Fri, 02 Jun 2023 05:27:16 +0000.