Working for
the Earth
The planet's most urgent crisis demands its most essential workers.
Yet those who protect the Earth are among the least protected themselves.
There is a dissonance at the heart of the green economy that no amount of policy jargon can conceal. The world needs 34 million new climate-related jobs by 2030, according to the World Economic Forum's Future of Jobs Report 2025. Yet the workers already labouring to protect the planet - field conservationists, waste reclaimers, renewable-energy installers, carbon monitoring technicians in the Global South - are compensated at rates that betray the very values the green transition claims to uphold.
This is not merely an economic oversight. It is a philosophical contradiction. The green economy promises to reconcile human prosperity with planetary health. But if the workers building that economy cannot achieve prosperity themselves, the entire moral architecture collapses.
The disparity unfolds along predictable lines. In high-income nations, a sustainability director earns $120,000-$180,000 annually. An environmental lawyer commands comparable figures. In India, the same strategic competencies - carbon accounting, ESG compliance, BRSR reporting - fetch a fraction of that. In Sub-Saharan Africa, frontline conservation workers earn less than subsistence wages while stewarding ecosystems that sequester carbon for the entire planet.
depending on where and how they do it
Fracture One: The Knowledge Asymmetry. Sixty-eight percent of energy-sector degree programmes globally remain focused on fossil fuels. Only 32% are dedicated to renewables. The workers who most need green skills - those in industrialising economies, those in informal sectors, those in agriculture - are the furthest from accessing them. The REN21 Global Status Report 2025 identifies a projected shortfall of 7 million skilled workers in core green sectors by 2030. This is not an abstract number; it is a structural barrier that ensures the transition's benefits flow upward and northward.
Fracture Two: The Productivity-Wage Decoupling. The ILO's Global Wage Report 2024-25 documents a pattern that should alarm every advocate of climate justice. In high-income countries, productivity has risen 29% since 1999. Real wages have risen only 15%. The economic surplus generated by the green transition - the efficiency gains, the new markets, the regulatory arbitrage - is being captured by capital, not distributed to labour. When a carbon accounting firm in London bills $500 per hour for ESG advisory but pays its data analyst in Bengaluru $15 per hour for the same underlying work, the green transition is not creating shared value. It is widening the extraction gap.
Fracture Three: The Informal Economy Blind Spot. In low-income countries, nearly 22% of workers earn less than half the median hourly wage, often in informal settings. These workers - waste reclaimers, smallholder farmers practising regenerative agriculture, artisanal miners who could be retrained for critical mineral extraction - are invisible to the formal green economy. They are not counted, not compensated, and not transitioned.
Current flows: $1.3 trillion.
The gap is not just financial. It is moral.
"Climate action that exacerbates inequalities can surface geopolitical and socioeconomic fragmentation, which can impact the cost, speed and acceptance of the green transition."World Economic Forum - Putting People at the Centre of Climate Action, 2024
Justice in the green transition is not a programme to be designed after the infrastructure is built. It must be woven into the architecture from the outset. Drawing on frameworks from the ILO, WEF, and IMF, five interconnected interventions can create a streamlined pathway - one that treats human capital with the same strategic seriousness as carbon budgets.
Consider the arithmetic of inequality that the World Economic Forum laid bare in January 2024. The richest 10% of households own 60-80% of wealth globally. The poorest 50% own less than 5%. In no region of the world do the bottom 50% of emitters contribute more than 5% of greenhouse gas emissions. Yet the exposure to climate hazards falls disproportionately on precisely those populations.
The green transition, if executed without justice at its core, will become the defining failure of 21st-century governance - not because it failed to decarbonise, but because it succeeded in doing so while leaving half the world behind.
Working for the Earth should not require sacrificing one's own wellbeing on it. The dialectic must resolve: the thesis of planetary urgency and the antithesis of worker precarity must synthesise into a third way - one where protecting the planet and protecting the people who protect it are understood as the same act.
That synthesis is not inevitable. It must be built - through policy, through finance, through the persistent moral imagination of those who refuse to accept that justice and sustainability are competing goods.
"Only by making the green transition truly work for people and economies - by tailoring solutions to context, investing in capacity, and driving shared economic value - can we maintain momentum on climate."World Economic Forum & McKinsey - Making the Green Transition Work, November 2025