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September 23, 2021
Renewable energy and energy efficiency have long defined the workforce of the clean energy economy. The people in these fields have propelled opportunities to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and will continue to do so in the coming decades.
Yet, there are more and more areas of work—beyond renewable energy and energy efficiency—that are contributing to reducing greenhouse gas emissions and addressing the impacts of climate change. These range from utility company analysts reducing wildfire risks to city chief resilience officers.
This year, EESI added an adaptation and resilience jobs section to our Climate Jobs fact sheet for the first time to start to capture this wider diversity of jobs. And we realize it might raise some questions: Is climate adaptation and resilience an industry? How do you define an adaptation job? What sectors do they appear in? What sorts of jobs are adaptation and resilience jobs? How do we count them? And are these jobs new or have they actually been around for a long time?
We are glad you asked! Here, we break down what we know and what we have still to learn about adaptation and resilience jobs.
Climate adaptation and resilience do not provide one good or service like the car or restaurant industry provides cars or food. Also, adaptation and resilience work is spread out across multiple industries and sectors, and the skills to make companies, governments, and organizations more resilient to climate impacts can be incorporated into many different types of jobs. Nevertheless, while adaptation and resilience may not fit the traditional definition of an industry, it can be helpful to think of it as an industry in order to explain the volume and types of jobs that are contained within it.
The Climate Change Business Journal placed the value of the U.S. adaptation and resilience industry at $2.4 billion in 2019. According to the Journal’s assessment, the industry includes people who work in “climate risk assessment and analysis, climate adaptation planning, adaptation design, engineering, and construction, disaster risk reduction, disaster preparedness and response planning, and climate adaptation equipment and systems.” The American Society of Adaptation Professionals—the professional association for climate adaptation and resilience workers—finds that there is demand for adaptation jobs in all 50 states and D.C., which underlines the need for this work across geographic areas. The Climate Change Business Journal also finds that there is demand for adaptation services from a range of clients, including local governments, the federal government, port authorities, water utilities, and insurance companies.
Adaptation and resilience professionals are defined as “anyone who is integrating information about future climate conditions in their day-to-day work,” according to the American Society of Adaptation Professionals. For example, they integrate considerations of existing and projected physical risks into their actions and decision-making, including global temperature rise; precipitation, temperature, fire, and storm events and trends; and sea level rise.
There are many people whose jobs incorporate climate adaptation into their work, but they do not necessarily work for an organization or company with an overall mission focused on adaptation. These are still adaptation jobs. Adaptation jobs may focus entirely on adaptation or only partially. According to ASAP’s survey of their members, 76.3 percent report spending 50 percent or more of their time on adaptation-related projects and tasks, including 32.5 percent who report spending all their time on adaptation.
There are also organizations and companies entirely focused on adaptation. The Lightsmith Group has designed an adaptation solutions taxonomy to define what makes a small- to mid- size enterprise an adaptation and resilience enterprise. Their research determined that the company provides technology, products, or services that do one or both of the following:
“1) Address systemic barriers to adaptation by strengthening users’ ability to understand and respond to physical climate risks and related impacts and/or capture related opportunities;
2) Contribute to preventing or reducing material physical climate risk and/or the adverse associated impacts on assets, economic activities, people, or nature.”
Adaptation and resilience jobs can be found almost anywhere. American Society of Adaptation Professional members report working for, or primarily with, for-profit companies (26 percent of members), academia (24 percent), U.S. or Tribal governments (24 percent), and nonprofits (22 percent). According to an assessment of jobs posted to ASAP’s job board in 2019 and 2020, the highest proportion of jobs—30 percent—were in non-profit organizations. Seventeen percent of the job postings were for positions at academic institutions, and 16 percent were for jobs with for-profit companies. The other sectors included regional governing entities, international organizations, international governments, and U.S. federal, state, local, and Tribal governments. Within each of these sectors, the jobs span issue areas from agriculture to water resources.
There are five general categories that describe the types of jobs that use climate data and information: practitioner, service or tool provider, funder, policy maker, and advocate.[1] Adaptation and resilience jobs can also fall anywhere along the adaptation categories of action: measure and learn, plan, fund and invest, develop and deploy technology, communicate and engage, build physical infrastructure, shift management practices and recurring behavior, and change policy and law.
Practitioners could be construction workers incorporating resilience to extreme weather into the homes they build or people who plant urban trees to reduce extreme heat in cities. Engineers working for the Army Corps who are guided by Engineering with Nature® principles would also be categorized as adaptation practitioners.
Service and tool providers would include people who create maps to inform adaptation planning and those who conduct hydrological forecasting modelling. It would also include many federal government jobs, such as the staff at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration who manage Digital Coast, a data repository used to generate resilience-related resources for coastal decision-makers.
Funders include those who work at philanthropic organizations as well as in finance and financial institutions to support adaptation work. For example, Community Development Financial Institutions like the Solar and Energy Loan Fund in Florida provide low- and moderate- income households with access to funding for storm resilience. These jobs financing adaptation and resilience to climate change are adaptation jobs.
Policy makers, such as chief resilience officers in cities, chief heat officers, and people designing adaptation plans and policies within city, state, federal, and Tribal governments, are working in climate adaptation. People designing policy for private companies to assess and address climate risk also work in adaptation.
Advocates have jobs at a wide range of organizations across the United States, including groups like the Association of State Floodplain Managers, watershed associations, and the large environmental groups (Union of Concerned Scientists, The Nature Conservancy, World Wildlife Fund, etc.). There are also many place-based organizations and jobs advocating for climate adaptation in their home communities or regions.
This is a big challenge because unlike renewable energy jobs, for example, there are no Bureau of Labor Statistics Standard Occupational Classification (SOC) codes designed for adaptation and resilience jobs. So, there is no systematic way, at present, to count all adaptation and resilience jobs. Revisions to the SOC system to track these jobs would greatly aid in future analysis of employment in adaptation and resilience.
For now, there are a number of measures that we have available to assess jobs in the field. One option is to look at the number of members engaged with the American Society of Adaptation Professionals. ASAP currently represents close to 800 individual adaptation professionals and has 38 organizational members that collectively employ over 100,000 people.
Another option is to look at demand for people with adaptation and resilience skills. Through an analysis of job postings using Burning Glass Technology, ASAP found at least 1,012 and 1,248 adaptation jobs were posted in 2019 and 2020, respectively. This indicates that organizations, companies, and governments are hiring for adaptation and resilience jobs, even during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The ASAP’s job posting database and the job postings found through Burning Glass Technology show that people were hired for adaptation jobs in all 50 states and the District of Columbia in 2019 and 2020.
Both the member numbers from ASAP and the job posting analysis certainly undercount current jobs in adaptation and resilience—probably by an order of magnitude. So, while they are helpful in understanding that these jobs exist and hiring is ongoing, it is important to understand that this is a floor for the number of current adaptation and resilience jobs in the United States.
Two major areas that are likely left out of these numbers are blue collar workers and people in frontline communities. As ASAP explains, “Adaptation is, sometimes explicitly and sometimes implicitly, a field of privilege. People and organizations hurt first and worst by climate impacts are often necessarily focused on immediate basic survival. Organizations and leaders working with marginalized communities may not include in their position descriptions the keywords we look for to make posting decisions (e.g. ‘climate change’; ‘preparedness’).” Construction workers who will primarily be implementing adaptation-related infrastructure projects may also be missing these key search terms in their posted job descriptions.
While employment in adaptation and resilience is growing, it is not new; 17.4 percent of ASAP members report having worked in the field for more than 15 years and 34.7 percent of members have worked in the field for 6-10 years. Of course, many new job positions are also being created that will establish a focus on adaptation for a company or organization for the first time.
Some people may have had adaptation added into their job description after many years of being in a position. This may be quite common for people such as city planners who did not previously consider future climate impacts in their work, but now do so as a central part of how they guide the city’s development. There are also jobs that have been focused on adaptation for a long time like coastal zone managers.
The Climate Change Business Journal concludes that “governments, utilities, and corporations will be looking for experienced and multidisciplinary firms to build, manage, and operate coastal asset protection in the face of sea level rise, as well as protecting assets threatened by major shifts in climate impacting temperature, precipitation, fire vulnerability, and other threats increased by the impact of ongoing increase in carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere.” In addition, employers may also be exploring ways to adapt in ways that create new opportunities.
Climate change impacts are here, so too must be the people trained in and knowledgeable about addressing these impacts for organizations, companies, and communities to survive and thrive. While significant work has been undertaken by ASAP and other organizations to understand and assess the adaptation workforce, further investment in adaptation and resilience job analysis, such as revisions to the Standard Occupational Classification (SOC) system managed by the Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics to track these jobs, would aid employers, educators, and workers in clearly identifying occupations in adaptation and resilience. The Department of Labor could also consider funding adaptation and resilience skill building programs to further support the development of the workforce needed to address the growing impacts of climate change.
Author: Anna McGinn
This article is designed as a companion to the Climate Jobs 2021 EESI fact sheet. This article and the adaptation and resilience section of the fact sheet are based on collaboration between EESI and the American Society of Adaptation Professionals. To request access to the ASAP jobs data, email info@adaptpros.org.
[1] These categories were adapted from the 'Advancing the Data Lifecycle' session of the 2019 National Adaptation Forum, with support from the American Society of Adaptation Professionals, Azavea, University of North Carolina Asheville, National Environmental Modeling and Analysis Center (NEMAC)/Fernleaf, ICLEI: Local Governments for Sustainability, and The Kresge Foundation.
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