Workforce gaps are a key bottleneck when it comes to reducing carbon emissions in almost every country. Even where capital, technology, and political will are available, shortages of skilled workers are slowing delivery of decarbonisation plans, delaying installations, and deterring investment. This trend will grow as the time available for cutting emissions runs down. Solving workforce shortages is thus a pressing climate policy priority.

In a new paper, we for the first time put a number on the climate impact of adding one more worker where clean energy activities are held back by worker shortages. We focus on cases where clean energy installations are delayed —or would never happen— because there are not enough workers. When one additional worker fills that gap, those projects can move ahead, cutting emissions that would otherwise continue. (We call the work enabled by this additional worker the “marginal contribution”.) Our modelling shows that, in these situations, a single worker can be linked to avoiding several thousand tonnes of CO₂. This is the case even when accounting for success in broader grid decarbonisation goals (Figure 1).

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