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Demand for Green Skills in the Latin American Labour Market: Mapping the Available Evidence and Research Gaps: Comparison
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Please note this is a comparison between Version 2 by Abigail Zou and Version 1 by Jessica Karina Fernandez Salazar.

Demand for green skills denotes the requirement, on the part of employers and productive structures, for knowledge, abilities, and dispositions oriented towards reducing the environmental impact of economic activity. It differs from green employment in that it records occupational content rather than jobs. It can be measured by two routes: the occupational route, which infers the skill content of jobs from occupational classifications and taxonomies, and the direct route, which captures the demand expressed by employers or by the labour market through surveys, interviews and the analysis of job advertisements. Sectoral approaches, which classify economic activities, inform on green employment but do not, on their own, reach the level of the skill. In the sources reviewed for Latin America, the category has no statistical existence: none of the 20 countries considered was found to maintain a classification of green skills, the global indicator monitoring target 4.4 of the Sustainable Development Goals measures digital rather than environmental skills, and national green employment estimates vary within a single country by factors of up to 14.2 depending on the methodological decision adopted. The only quantification of training demand identified in the literature reviewed was carried out in Brazil on 2010 data and identified 2,083,241 formal jobs, 4.5% of the country’s formal employment, in occupations whose requirements change as a result of the green transition. This entry delimits the concept against green employment, contrasts the available occupational taxonomies, inventories country-level coverage, documents the mechanisms producing that variation, and identifies the gaps that the available evidence leaves open.

  • green skills
  • green employment
  • skills demand
  • occupational classification
  • labour market
  • Latin America
  • just transition
The policy guidelines for a just transition towards environmentally sustainable economies and societies, approved by the Governing Body of the International Labour Organisation in 2015 and adopted unanimously by workers, employers and governments, organise their recommendations into three groups: macroeconomic, sectoral and enterprise policies; policies linked to job creation, particularly skills development and active labour market policies; and employment protection policies [1]. The second group bears directly on training systems, and it is the one that has generated the least evidence in Latin America.
The international agenda reinforces that commitment from the educational side. Target 4.4 of the Sustainable Development Goals requires states to substantially increase, by 2030, the number of youth and adults with relevant skills, including technical and vocational skills, for employment, decent jobs, and entrepreneurship. The global indicator monitoring that target, however, is 4.4.1, which measures the proportion of youth and adults with information and communications technology skills, defined by whether they carried out specified computer-related activities during the previous three months [2]. States therefore commit to building skills for decent work in decarbonising economies while monitoring digital skills alone. That distance between commitment and instrument helps to explain why no national statistical system in the region is required to produce the environmental data the agenda itself calls for.
The obstacle is statistical before it is theoretical. Estimating green employment requires classifying activities or sectors, a task national classifications already permit. Estimating demand for green skills requires descending to occupational content, and no consolidated category exists at that level. The International Labour Organisation concedes as much in writing when documenting the Peruvian case, where the absence of a statistical classification of green skills led it to put an indirect question to firms, linking training to environmental protection objectives rather than to the skills themselves [3]. The Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean reaches the same diagnosis in general terms, warning that no agreed way of operationalising the concepts exists [4].
One seldom-cited exception qualifies that picture. Nonato and Maciente mapped the Brazilian Classification of Occupations against the United States occupational classification and disaggregated, using the 2010 Annual Social Information Report, four categories of potentially green employment. One of them, labelled occupations with increased green skills, comprised 2,083,241 formal jobs, that is 4.5% of Brazilian formal employment for that year [5]. This is neither an estimate of green employment nor a policy declaration: it counts existing jobs whose performance requires additional environmental skills. In the literature reviewed for this entry, it is the only quantification of demand for green skills identified for a Latin American country, and no replication or update of it was located.
The contrast with recent output is telling. Moscon et al., from the same institute, propose a typology based on economic activity and analyse the labour market using the Continuous National Household Sample Survey, concluding that green activities account for 17% of the employed population and that the proportion remained stable between 2012 and 2022. Their authors close by warning that whether workers will hold the qualifications needed to adapt to the transition is a matter of concern, and they state that the study of green skills falls outside the scope of their work, flagging it as a possible extension for future research [6]. The team that has most recently characterised green employment in the region’s largest economy thus identifies the same frontier this entry addresses.
A second shortfall, different in kind, compounds the first. National green employment estimates, which would serve as the population reference for any calculation of training demand, are not comparable across countries nor, in several cases, within a single country. Argentina reports 650,000 green jobs for 2015 under a broad hypothesis and 486,000 under a restrictive one, the difference arising from whether public road passenger transport is included [7]. Chile estimates 7506 green jobs for 2018 after applying decent work weightings, a figure the report itself describes as nine times lower than the one obtained without them [8]. In Mexico, the International Labour Organisation observes that comparing its own figures with those of the national environmental authority yields a difference exceeding one million jobs, and concludes that a uniform methodology must be established to track environment-related employment and its quality [3]. The magnitude of green employment thus depends more on the methodological decision adopted than on the economic structure observed.
Indexed research has advanced on its own terms, though unevenly. Vona et al. constructed what is now the most cited measure of the green skills content of occupations, deriving it from the descriptions of a national occupational classification and linking it to environmental regulation [9]. Apostel and Barslund reviewed how green jobs are measured and characterised, documenting a dispersion of definitions that this entry finds replicated in the region [10]. Montanari et al. demonstrated, through scientometric analysis, that the literature does not even converge on the name of the object, alternating between green skills and sustainability competences [11]. On the applied side, Nikoloski et al. propose identifying gaps through labour market intelligence [12], and da Costa et al. address the mismatch between university outcomes and industry requirements [13].

References

  1. International Labour Organization. Informalidad, Empleos Verdes y Transición Justa en Sectores Relevantes para América Latina y el Caribe; International Labour Office: Geneva, Switzerland, 2024.
  2. United Nations Statistics Division. SDG Indicator Metadata: Indicator 4.4.1; United Nations: New York, NY, USA, 2025; Available online: https://unstats.un.org/sdgs/metadata/files/Metadata-04-04-01.pdf (accessed on 29 May 2026).
  3. International Labour Organization. Conceptualización de Empleos Verdes en Perú; International Labour Office on behalf of PAGE: Lima, Peru, 2021.
  4. Weller, J. Empleos Verdes y Sistemas de Protección Social: Aportes a la Transformación del Modelo de Desarrollo; Project Documents LC/TS.2025/23; ECLAC: Santiago, Chile, 2025.
  5. Nonato, F.J.A.P.; Maciente, A.N. A identificação de empregos verdes, ou com potencial verde, sob as óticas ocupacional e setorial no Brasil. Radar Tecnol. Produção Comércio Exter. 2012, 23, 57–66.
  6. Moscon, L.M.; Costa, K.V.; Pero, V.L.; Gesteira, P. Empregos verdes no Brasil: Caracterização e evolução entre 2012 e 2022. Merc. Trab. Conjunt. Análise 2024, 30, 39–47.
  7. International Labour Organization. Argentina: Potencial de Creación de Empleos Verdes en un Marco de Transición Justa; ILO Green Jobs Programme: Buenos Aires, Argentina, 2020.
  8. Ministry of the Environment. Informe del Estado del Medio Ambiente 2020; Government of Chile: Santiago, Chile, 2020.
  9. Vona, F.; Marin, G.; Consoli, D.; Popp, D. Environmental regulation and green skills: An empirical exploration. J. Assoc. Environ. Resour. Econ. 2018, 5, 713–753.
  10. Apostel, A.; Barslund, M. Measuring and characterising green jobs: A literature review. Energy Res. Soc. Sci. 2024, 111, 103477.
  11. Montanari, S.; Agostini, E.; Francesconi, D. Are we talking about green skills or sustainability competences? A scoping review using scientometric analysis. Sustainability 2023, 15, 14142.
  12. Nikoloski, D.; Sulich, A.; Sołoducho-Pelc, L.; Mancheski, G. Identifying green skills gaps through labor market intelligence. J. Infrastruct. Policy Dev. 2024, 8, 4868.
  13. da Costa, T.; Aranda Lopez, L.I.; Perussello, C.; Quinn, F. Addressing the demand for green skills: Bridging the gap between university outcomes and industry requirements. Sustainability 2025, 17, 2732.
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