Advanced Search
May 1, 2023
In 2020, there were 4.1 million climate jobs in the United States. One sector of these jobs that is not well-documented but is growing rapidly is climate adaptation. As the threats from climate change continue to worsen and we tackle this challenge, it will be critical to grow this workforce so we can prepare our communities as best as possible. In this episode, we speak with Rachel Jacobson from the American Society of Adaptation Professionals and Frank Niepold from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration about what these jobs are, how the government can track them, and strategies to increase equity and education within the adaptation workforce.
Show notes:
Sign up for our bi-weekly newsletter, Climate Change Solutions, for insight on the latest innovative climate solutions and environmental policy in action.
Follow us on social media @eesionline
About this Podcast:
With all the depressing climate news out there, it’s sometimes hard to see progress. The Climate Conversation cuts through the noise and presents you with relevant climate change solutions happening on the Hill and in communities around the United States.
Twice a month, join Environmental and Energy Study Institute staff members as they interview environmental, energy, and policy experts on practical, on-the-ground work that communities, companies, and governments are doing to address climate change.
Whether you want to learn more about the solutions to climate change, are an expert in environmental issues, or are a policy professional, this podcast is for you.
Episode Transcript:
Anna McGinn: Hello and welcome to The Climate Conversation. I'm Anna McGinn, policy manager at EESI, and subbing in today for the podcast’s usual host, EESI’s president Dan Bresette. Today we are going to be talking about a topic that I'm particularly excited about, which is climate adaptation. This will be a great conversation to build off the previous podcast episode, which was about the research happening at the U.S. Geologic Survey’s Climate Adaptation Science Centers. Today, we'll be learning more about the workforce within climate adaptation and the strategies we have to grow jobs in this critical industry. I'm pleased to be discussing this issue with my colleague, Policy Associate Molly Brind’Amour, who is brand new to the podcast. Welcome, Molly. I'm glad to be hosting the episode with you today.
Molly Brind’Amour: Hi, Anna. I'm excited to be here and looking forward to learning a lot more about climate adaptation careers from our guests today. Many of you listeners are probably already familiar with clean energy jobs generally, like someone who helps install solar panels, or build electric vehicles. But there are a lot of other jobs that are considered climate jobs, too.
Anna: In EESI’s climate jobs factsheet, which you can find in the show notes for the episode, we found that there were more than 4.1 million climate jobs in the United States in 2020. These jobs range from electricians to city planners to restoration ecologists, and much, much more. And the number of people in these jobs is only expected to grow as we work to meet our net-zero targets and tackle the climate crisis.
Molly: That's right, Anna. And we want to focus on climate adaptation jobs in particular for this podcast episode, because this is a job sector that is not well documented, but it's really growing quite rapidly. According to the American Society of Adaptation Professionals, a climate adaptation job is anyone who's integrating information about future climate conditions into their day to day work. So that could be an engineer with the Army Corps of Engineers, a city official that works reduce urban heat, a fundraising director that raises money to pay for adaptation projects, or many other jobs.
Anna: To learn more about this growing and diverse workforce, I'm thrilled to introduce today's guests, Rachel Jacobson and Frank Niepold. Rachel is the Acting Director of the American Society of Adaptation Professionals or ASAP. She leads the creation, implementation and continuous improvement of ASAP’s programs supporting leadership development, capacity building and effective adaptation practices. Frank is the Climate Education Senior Program Manager of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA. He oversees NOAA’s education section of the climate.gov website, which is a website that offers educational materials, data, news, resources, and professional development opportunities for people looking to incorporate climate science into their work and to create a climate literate nation. Additionally, he co-manages the Climate Program Office’s Communication, Education and Engagement Division, which is the largest federal team of its kind. Rachel and Frank, so excited to have you on the podcast today and dive into our conversation on the climate adaptation workforce.
Rachel Jacobson: Great to be here. Thanks so much.
Frank Niepold: Likewise.
Molly: So I'd like to start by learning more about what kinds of roles can be considered as climate adaptation jobs. Could you give some more examples about what you think this work really looks like in practice? And I know it's difficult to count these jobs. But could you share any insight on how many of these jobs might exist in the United States? We'll start with you, Rachel, and then hear from Frank.
Rachel: Yeah, thanks so much for this question. So we like to first point out that adaptation and resilience jobs can be found in every sector. And that's reflected in the network that we run at ASAP. Our network is almost evenly split between the public sector at all scales, the private sector, the nonprofit sector, and academia, and adaptation and resilience work covers a ton of issue areas in a whole variety of industries. And that's really because all parts of society are affected by climate impacts. So it requires many different types of adaptation strategies, and therefore many different types of work in order to address that. For example, we've got community planning and institutional planning from everywhere from local governments to companies. We have folks building physical infrastructure, and folks building social infrastructure. We have people in the finance and insurance industries, assessing physical climate risks and implementing strategies to incentivize addressing that risk. We have folks who are working on developing and deploying climate resilient technologies, folks who are communicating with people and institutions the information they need to prepare for climate impacts. And we have folks working on ecosystem adaptation, conserving, restoring and establishing new ecological connections to facilitate the ability for fish, wildlife and plants to adapt to climate change. And then there's also a ton of legal and policy work that goes into this space as well creating the opportunity to require or incentivize adaptation action as well as to disincentivize, what we call maladaptation, which is when we think we're adapting, but really what we're doing is making the problem worse, perhaps for a different group of people.
Frank: It's a really great question and an incredibly important question. In my experience at the federal level, and a lot of different projects and roles I play at NOAA and at the interagency level, and then national level, that are really looking at this connection between climate and workforce. When it comes to resilience and adaptation, what I'm seeing is a lot less description. When you talk about renewable energy, it's incredibly specific, and multiple roles. It's been very well defined, because it's much more mature in that space. When it comes to resilience, what we're seeing is, as projects are beginning to move from planning, which is a role and a job, to implementation, you're seeing emergence of new jobs. Just to give you an example, landscape architect, as denoted by Department of Labor, there are sub-kinds of landscape architects, there are two kinds of landscape architects for golf courses. None of them have been described yet for adaptation. So the process with the way we see it is these jobs are emerging. We know landscape architect, especially with living shorelines, is going to be a very robust career. But it has not been codified. So it's showing up in practice before it's showing up in the structures of workforce. And that's what I think is the most exciting phase of this work.
Rachel: Frank, that's such a great segue into the question of how do we count these jobs, because you did such a great job of explaining why it's so difficult to count these jobs. You know, the way that we talk about that with our members. And the way that our members talk about it is we have some folks where adaptation, resilience is the main focus of the position. So chief resilience officer is a great example of that, that a lot of people are aware of. And then there are folks whose job has evolved over time as the employer’s needs have changed, or just as the experience in that context has changed. And so a couple of different ways that we've tried to go about counting these jobs. You know, one thing is kind of looking at how many people are engaged with us here at American Society of Adaptation Professionals, we have over 1,000 individual adaptation professionals who are part of our network and over 45 organizational members who collectively employ hundreds of thousands of people. But of course, just looking at those 1,000 individual members is going to give you a massive undercount of the number of people who are actually doing this work. In 2019 and 2020, we did a pretty thorough analysis of all the jobs that were posted publicly here in the U.S. And we had about 1,000 jobs in 2019 and 1,200 jobs in 2020, that we according to sort of our parameters could be classified as climate adaptation jobs. We haven't done the analysis on the 2021 and 2022 jobs yet, but just from the raw data we've downloaded has close to 8,000 jobs that we'll be working with when we do that analysis. And so again, even if we say, well, maybe half of those are kind of junk that we have to throw out and they got in there, you know, they slipped in there, that's still 4,000 jobs, which is a huge increase from 1,200, in 2020. But the last thing I want to say about this is that we need to remember that adaptation jobs get created, meaning an employer can turn any job into an adaptation job by creating the conditions for that worker to use future climate information and how they execute the role.
Anna: Thanks, Rachel and Frank, you both mentioned how these jobs are not yet codified. And I want to kind of dig into that. So what is the role of the federal government in better understanding, especially job numbers and types of jobs in the adaptation and resilience workforce? And would greater involvement of the federal government allow for increased education and outreach about these roles to get more people into them and into the field?
Frank: So a couple of things we're doing to get a handle on this is one is if you look at the executive order that started climate work for the this current administration, executive order 14008, it made climate policy an all-of-government strategy, and it is a very real thing. So that means you pick up agencies with robust focus, like Department of Labor, which is where most of what you're describing happens, but the funding and the programmatic activity related to climate resilience is distributed across other departments and agencies like FEMA, NOAA and others. So what we are doing is, I've recently established a new interagency working group under the U.S. Global Change Research Program, to coordinate climate workforce activities like what you're describing. The new organization is called the Climate Engagement and Capacity Building Interagency Group of the U.S. Global Change Research Program. And Department of Labor is a member of that group, and is NOAA, and is FEMA. So you know, what we're focusing in on is how do we structure this activity and really put the engine of what we do in a distributed way across the government in order to handle these kinds of issues. We've done this in the past with green jobs. But this is a different activity. Clearly in our analysis that we've already described, is that the codification of the jobs in the workforce approach comes subsequent to the creation of the jobs. And so we're now in the creation phase, clearly based on what Rachel just said, but now moving that next move into a coordinated approach to how we actually quantify, but also describe, because one of the last pieces of this process is, we know our schools and our workforce development enterprise needs to better understand the requirements, the skills, the capabilities that are need to be created, and the quantities of what is coming from projected work. How many landscape architects do we need in a coastal context? There's a quantity there, because the amount of living shorelines we're going to need to use across the country is hard to fathom how large it is. But the people who have the skills to actually do that process effectively and skillfully, is another matter. So I mean, there's a lot of work we're describing that is future forward, but to be able to describe the jobs and clarity and projections of how many we're going to need is really the function of the Department of Labor at the federal level. We're going to be in partnership with them. But that is work that is beginning to move forward right now.
Rachel: Just building off of that, Frank, we work with a lot of higher education institutions. And one thing we hear a lot is how the incentives and the standards that they need, in order to be able to justify building out the types of higher education programs that are going to get us to the trained workforce that we need, that they need that signal from the Department of Labor, and they need those occupation classifications to happen so that they can have the enabling environment to do the work of building out those training programs.
Molly: That's a great point. Thank you so much for that, Rachel and Frank. So Anna, and I talked earlier about how climate adaptation jobs, they're really diverse in terms of the sectors they cover and all the different professions that are available. So as this industry continues to grow, what are some strategies that we can implement for ensuring that these jobs are accessible to underrepresented groups like women, differently-abled people, or Black, Indigenous and people of color?
Rachel: Yeah, thanks so much for that question, Molly. Because, you know, we spent a lot of time in the previous question talking about standards and standardization. And that part of the conversation absolutely needs to be balanced out with the top line message here, which is that the adaptation field is one that seeks to really highly value the knowledge and skills that come from lived experience of climate impacts. It is absolutely critical that as this industry continues to grow, that we continue to place our value of lived experience in the center of how we're building out the profession. The reason why it is so critical to increase the share of adaptation and resilience workers who have come from communities that are most affected by climate impacts, and to increase their representation at all job levels, is because those are the people who truly know how to create equitable outcomes from adaptation work, because they've lived it. We have to make sure that there are incentives and support for employers in trades such as construction to ensure that their jobs have family supporting wages, and strong worker protections and are really in alignment with the work that they're doing to be guided by good adaptation practice so that they're getting that on the job training to make sure that the work that they're performing is going to lead to the adaptation outcomes that we want to see. We need to invest in universal broadband access to increase the accessibility of knowledge economy jobs and other types of remote work. And there are certainly many jobs in the adaptation space that would fall into that category. And again, if we want to make sure that people with lived experience of climate impacts, people who are most impacted by climate change, are getting into these jobs, many of those folks currently are without broadband access. So that will make a big difference. We know that a lot of adaptation work is going to be performed by people working in trades. We also know that a lot of adaptation work historically has been completed by gig workers or contract workers. And so the types of social safety nets that support people who are underemployed or living just a bit above the poverty line are really critical to make sure that those people can stay in the workforce and keep doing that work.
Frank: This is a crucial question and the way I think about this really important topic is that we're talking about opportunity. We're talking about jobs. And those are crucial to make sure they're available to all. I was asked by seventh grader a long time ago when I was giving a climate change talk. And his question was great. And he said, you know, like, I think I get climate change. But what I want to know is, are all the jobs going to change? And it was a spectacular question. And what I said was, look, some jobs are going to go away, right? Some jobs are going to change and some jobs are going to emerge. That's it made a little bit of time to think about exactly how to answer that amazing question. But it's true. And with adaptation, many of them are emerging or changing jobs. I know in the federal government based on the priorities that we have, we are definitely trying to figure out how to afford those opportunities and benefits for all. And I think we're learning. What I will definitely say is, as I see my role, and my colleagues roles across the government and these agencies that are very diverse and distributed, is that we're in a very learning mode, the Justice40 programs are all learning, how do we do this work in a way that affords those opportunities for those underserved and underrepresented communities.
Anna: So our next question gets into kind of some of these pathways to these careers that we've been referencing. So earlier on, in this podcast season, we did an episode about clean energy workforce and apprenticeship and training programs that are needed to grow that workforce. And that's come up a little bit in this conversation already, that’s a workforce that's more well defined and has a lot of those programs established. I'd love to continue that conversation here talking about adaptation and resilience workforce, I'm curious if you all could describe some training programs that you're aware of, or work with, that are emerging or already exists to support the growing adaptation and resilience workforce, and what else could be established to support educational or vocational pathways to get people into these jobs?
Frank: This is such a crucial question. The answer to that seventh graders question, right? He didn't ask about the magnitudes. I think the magnitudes, meaning like, are all the jobs going to change? Yes. How much are they going to change? How many new job categories is going to show up in quantities, back to that question about quantities, right, counting. But we also have to project. And what I'm looking at is when you think about it, career development usually happens at, you know, the career technical, high school, junior year into community college, and sometimes into the bachelors and beyond, right. However, the people who go into those programs is insufficient. How you deal with that is actually all the way back at fifth grade. In fact, actually, we had a meeting with some students the other day, and they said, actually, it shows up even earlier. When people come into the classrooms in like second grade, and they talk about their jobs, they're socializing career exploration for young people to think about, hey, maybe that's something I'm excited. But it does illustrate that the ability for a young person to begin thinking about what their passions are, what's interesting to them, what skills they have, shows up much earlier in the process. The pathways for how to deal with climate change are so vast in quantities, that you're going to need to have a much more robust articulation from a much younger age, in order to ensure that you have a broad cone when you get to the junior year of high school, to the community college, and beyond. If we don't have that broad work deep in our architecture and starting like today, then we won't meet our quantities. We might get our skill, but we won't get our quantities. So I think that it's a crucial piece of the strategy that we are just beginning to realize because of the magnitudes of count that we see needed. But if we don't have the people, I am deeply concerned that we have a bottleneck in everything. We have the technologies, we have the strategies, we have the plans, we have the policies, we have the funding, but I don't think we have the people yet.
Rachel: I will talk about the other side of this coin, which is the education and capacity building that we need for the workers who are doing the work today, in order to see the outcomes that we want from the adaptation and resilience work that's happening. And so in order to address that, we need to both augment existing training and create new training. We have existing climate training that we need to augment to include a focus that's more explicitly on adaptation and resilience, because a lot of climate training leans heavily towards climate change mitigation. We need to augment existing industry specific training to include climate change, specifically adaptation and resilience. And then we need new trainings and new content that helps us stay on top of how the adaptation field is evolving. I mean, we are learning new things all the time about how to most equitably and effectively perform adaptation work and our trainings need to be able to keep up with that. And each of these types of new content or changes to existing trainings has to be happening in higher education, in professional education, and in trades education. There are a lot of climate adaptation focused higher education programs that have been popping up over the last few years. You know, one that we work with is at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, they have a community climate adaptation program, where they are getting their students into communities to co-develop, co-create and co-implement climate adaptation work with them, and using their expertise and experiential education to make that effective for both the communities and the students. And then I want to discuss briefly a really exciting project that ASAP is doing right now with the Forest Service. So we're working with the Forest Service Office of Sustainability and Climate, to apply our knowledge and competencies framework for climate adaptation and climate resilience professionals to improve climate literacy across the entire workforce of the Forest Service. And what's so cool about this project is it gives us the opportunity to look at the workforce as a whole and to actually segment that workforce and to really deeply understand, how do climate change considerations come into play for different actors within that workforce? And how can the knowledge and competencies framework that we've developed with our members be applied differently for different types of folks who are within that workforce, and that's ultimately leading to the exact process that I described before, where we'll be augmenting existing trainings and creating new trainings to really maximize the overall climate literacy of the Forest Service workforce, but also maximizing the effectiveness of the outcomes of the work that Forest Service employees are performing.
Molly: Let's talk about Congress, which is where EESI, of course, focuses a lot of our education work. So we sort of have a two-part final question for you. First, while it concluded its work at the end of the last Congress in 2022, the House of Representatives Select Committee on the Climate Crisis published a final report, which provides a lot to think about in terms of adaptation workforce policy opportunities. These include creating a group called the Center for the Climate Resilience Workforce to help support job creation, quality and training, plus a Climate Resilience Service Corps to really carry out these national service projects on adaptation. Second, we have the Inflation Reduction Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. What do you think about the role of Congress and these new laws and really helping support that adaptation workforce?
Frank: So I'm a federal civil servant at one of the agencies that is at the center of climate resilience, and we have a significant investment in the IRA funds. And I believe on the BIL funds, Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. And you know, from the doing part, you know, we don't focus on policy, we receive policy, right. So I'm on the implementation side of that question. We are definitely seeing an enhancement of resources to actually advance these practices, these efforts, these investments for enhancing resilience across the nation. I think what our job is going to be is to really make sure that those investments are well-understood by those who called for those investments and making them in clear, understandable, accessible ways that for the nation, for Congress, for the administration, for other people wanting to do and learn from this work. So as we build out our ability to do this, one of the key tools that will be used is the U.S. Climate Resilience Toolkit. It's a very powerful portal focused on this, it's an interagency shared portal for this kind of work. As we go to implement resilience focused programs, we will be surfacing those programs, elevating their products, and exploring what the learnings are and the gaps at the same time. Again, my work is on deploying policy that comes. What I'm excited about is that the robust interagency opportunities between FEMA, NOAA, NASA, EPA, Forest Service, USDA, keep on going down the list. It is a robust constellation of effort. And so I think that that we are being asked in these interagency processes to really work across the federal family in a very different way than we've ever worked before, because the resources are there to allow us to do that. But also, the priority to really look at climate and an all-of-government approach is totally appropriate to the issue that we face. We know that's just the beginning of the work, but it is definitely a massive expansion. And for me, it feels like we're finally really rolling our sleeves the way we should have been able to do for quite some time.
Rachel: I want to say, and this really dovetails exactly with what you said, Frank, the work doesn't happen well, just by being funded. It's not a given that these jobs will contribute to the resilience outcomes that we want. That's going to take work, it's going to require building community, capacity to even be able to access that funding for communities that have historically been underserved and marginalized. It's going to require making sure that planning efforts are funded, so that the projects that are funded out of this money are truly adaptive and tied to a holistic planning process that identifies the types of projects and the way that those projects should be implemented to actually achieve those outcomes. And it's going to require making sure that we actually have mandates to look at future climate, you know, that's not the case for all of these investments. And it's not even the case that we have the data needed to ensure that in every instance. So I'm really excited about the opportunity. But as Frank said, there's a lot of work that we have to do in order to not even just maximize this opportunity, but to even take advantage of it. I'm really grateful to the Select Committee for putting out such a comprehensive set of policy recommendations, we draw on those a lot, as we are articulating and fleshing out our policy priorities here at ASAP. So one of those, as you mentioned, is to establish a Climate Resilient Service Corps. And I want to note that, yes, absolutely. At ASAP, we are part of the Partnership for the Civilian Climate Corps, which advocates for national service of climate resilience and a national service corps can absolutely play a really valuable role in a holistic workforce development strategy, creating first job on the job training, bringing disparate groups of people together towards a common purpose. And we know from the Corporation for National and Community Service that national service programs are associated with really positive employment outcomes, like greater likelihood of people without a high school diploma finding work, for example. But I really want to emphasize that national service is just one strategy. It's not the solution that we need for a strong adaptation workforce. It's a strategy that needs to be part of a holistic set of actions that we're taking. I also want to point out, there are some important changes that Congress really needs to make for national service to be most effective. And so I'm grateful to our partners at the Partnership for the CCC for articulating this. So clearly, you know, national service programs need to have wraparound services like child care and transportation that we already talked about. And then as we talked about, at length, centering, equity and inclusion in the way that service members are recruited. I am really excited to share that ASAP will be working this year to design a national service program, this will be focused on developing highly trained climate adaptation, workforce members at the intersection of building climate resilient rural communities. So it'll support adaptation and resilience planning and implementation in rural communities and work towards creating long term sustainability for resilience and adaptation work in those communities with respect to a Center for Climate Resilience Workforce, yes, a thousand times yes. You know, I hesitate to endorse creating new things, right, like there's so much that's out there. But as Frank said, we need coordination of these resources and for these resources, and that is the opportunity that I see in something like a Center for Climate Resilience Workforce, because we need sustained investment in the climate adaptation workforce, if it is going to grow in both quantity and quality that we need.
Anna: Thank you, Frank, and thank you so much, Rachel, I always love talking with you all about this topic. And I feel like we really dug into framing examples and new information on the climate adaptation and resilience workforce that is really going to help our listeners understand kind of the nuances of this conversation, and also key opportunities for moving the ball forward. So really, really appreciate your time, and we'll wrap it up there.
Rachel: This was really fun. And likewise, Frank learned a lot from you as well. And I always really appreciate the specific examples that you're able to bring to illustrate the workforce challenges that we face.
Frank: This was wonderful. Today's been a very successful day. I'm super excited.
Anna: Molly, that was a really exciting conversation that we just wrapped up with Rachel and Frank. I was so excited to hear some of the raw jobs numbers from Rachel for the 2022 jobs that they are looking at and also really excited to hear from Frank about the new federal interagency task force working on adaptation workforce. I think he mentioned 19 different federal agencies and other federal entities involved with that. So really just exciting to see the work that's happening in that space to really start to frame and define this workforce and support it. I also think that the conversation on making sure that lived experiences of people is centered in the way that we shaped the adaptation workforce is going to be so central to the equitable adaptation outcomes that we are looking for, and that we talk a lot about in EESI’s work. So really just exciting conversation, feeling inspired about adaptation, work ahead. And Molly would love to hear your thoughts and kind of key takeaways from the conversation.
Molly: Anna, I think I'm totally in agreement with you, I really left this conversation feeling really optimistic. There's definitely a lot more work to do. But it's great to know that so many people and organizations are going full speed ahead to help make this a really great transition. So I think I'm really optimistic about the direction this is going.
Anna: And if people want to learn any more about adaptation jobs, we have a couple of EESI resources: an adaptation jobs explainer that's about understanding the critical and growing workforce of adaptation and resilience. And we also have a recent resource looking at a review of federal legislation on climate adaptation that's been enacted from 2017 to the end of 2022. Feel free to check those out in the show notes.
Molly: If you want to learn more about EESI work and climate adaptation, head to our website at eesi.org. You can also follow us on social media at @eesionline for all of our recent updates. The Climate Conversation is published as a supplement to our bi-weekly newsletter, Climate Change Solutions, you can go to eesi.org/signup to subscribe. Thanks for joining us and we'll see you next time.
Advancing science-based climate solutions
Top-Rated Climate Nonprofit – 4-Star Charity