Demand for Green Skills in the Latin American Labour Market: Mapping the Available Evidence and Research Gaps

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.