Green Jobs and Skills in London – There could be 505,000 of them

This report examines the potential scale and nature of green jobs across the Central London Forward sub region. This report is accompanied by the Cross London report as well as reports for each of London’s other sub regional partnerships. Councils in central London will play a vital part in helping to deliver net zero. Boroughs across central London are engaged in a number of crucial activities in relation to decarbonising the energy supply, homes and buildings, and working with businesses. These activities are helping to drive the green economy of the future in the capital, in addition to wider factors such as central Government policy, and economic conditions in central London.

This report takes a mission-based approach to defining the green economy and identifying green jobs in central London, where a job is defined as green if it helps to deliver net zero or environmental goals. This approach builds on UK Government Green Jobs Taskforce definition. This definition was applied to data from the Low Carbon and Environmental Goods and Services (LCEGS) dataset and supervised machine learning through The Data City in order to provide an estimate of the number of green jobs in central London. Further analysis was then conducted based on various datasets, including research commissioned by the Climate Change Committee (CCC) and ONS labour force and business surveys to create a series of projections for future numbers of jobs, as well as to provide additional skills analysis.

Our analysis finds that by 2030, in a central scenario there could be 505,000 green jobs in the capital (a net increase of 50,000 jobs) reaching over a million by 2050. This is up from our current estimate of 234,300 green jobs, predominantly in the Green Finance, Homes and Buildings and Power sectors.

Source: Green Jobs and Skills in London: cross-London report