Every Job is a Climate Job

Every Job is a Climate Job 

The climate crisis is the challenge of our generation, but figuring out how to help can feel daunting and complicated. 

Climate solutions are all around us. When we put on our climate action glasses, we can see ways big and small to contribute to this global action in our daily lives, including in our professional capacity at work.

Every voice and skillset is needed. 

The climate crisis presents two simultaneous challenges: 1) the need to race to at least net zero global carbon dioxide emissions by 2050 and 2) the need to make our communities and economy more resilient to the effects of climate change that are already baked into the system. 

As workers in jobs today, we have professional skill sets that can contribute to a better planet and climate-safe future. For almost everyone, there are tangible actions you can take at work that help address the climate crisis. These solutions can be grouped into four critical categories, with concrete actions within each you can take today: 

Reducing Greenhouse Gas Emissions 

Do you make procurement decisions? Or manage key infrastructure, like a building, IT system, or transportation fleet? Are you an artful designer or an engineer? No matter your role, if you are dealing with materials, infrastructure or goods in the real world your role has the ability to help reduce carbon emissions. You can prioritize low-carbon alternatives in your procurement, extend the life of old infrastructure to reduce waste, design products with sustainable materials and low greenhouse gas emissions in mind, and take advantage of new energy management systems and clean technologies to reduce emissions. 

Storytelling

If you work in the service sector — in law, marketing, graphic design, customer service, accounting, insurance, etc —  how your work can directly impact climate action may feel more unclear. Good storytelling educates an audience about how to act, builds momentum for the needed collective actions, grants social license to good actors and takes it from bad actors, and inspires us to be our best selves.

In the service sector, there are many professions who put forth arguments to the public daily. If you are a lawyer, a marketer, or consultant, you can use your professional skills to protect fossil fuel interests from the truth about climate change, or you can help them to further the clean energy transition. Same, if you are a journalist, producer, content creator, or digital media specialist. 

If you have an audience, bring them along on a journey about climate solutions. 

Caretaking 

If you work in a caretaking profession, you are on the frontlines of the climate crisis. In taking care of your fellow community members, young and old, on good days and bad ones, you are weaving the social fabric that will be ever more important in a rapidly changing world. 

If you’re a home care worker, doctor, nurse, or EMT, understand that climate change puts individuals and communities under greater stress. If you are a teacher, you can educate your students about the environment and climate change in an age-appropriate way, and support your students in their own journeys of climate discovery. 

As caretakers, your empathy, presence and skills are what helps get us through hard times and, during the good times, what helps us build social fabric and trust with each other so that we are better prepared for hardship and disaster. Care matters, and we should honor it. 

Building Physical Resilience 

We know we can expect higher seas, more severe storms, greater wildfire risk, and more pronounced droughts and heat waves in the decades to come, even if we ambitiously decrease fossil fuel use. 

If your role involves procurement, construction, supply chains, building, insurance, infrastructure, or planning, you can help your company and community plan for the future by incorporating the latest climate impact expectations into your projects. By thinking ahead and building resilience into every project – particularly projects with an expected long operational life – you protect future resources and livelihoods. 

We know we must take bold action, today, in order to stop the worst impacts of a warming world and create the flourishing, bright future we know is possible. These are just a few of the ways that you, at work, can help.

Let’s keep up the fight, together, with all the tools we have!