What is the Just Transition Jobs Tracker?
The Just Transition Jobs Tracker (JTJT) is an opensource, webbased platform that aggregates, visualises, and analyses employment data linked to the worldwide transition toward renewable energy, circular economy practices and climateresilient industries. It aims to give policymakers, businesses, trade unions, NGOs and citizens a clear picture of where new jobs are emerging, which sectors are evolving, and how workers can be supported through retraining and decentwork guarantees.
Why it matters
A just transition is more than simply replacing fossilfuel jobs with green ones. It entails:
- Economic security: Creating stable, wellpaid positions that do not leave workers vulnerable to market volatility.
- Social equity: Ensuring that disadvantaged communities, women and minorities have equal access to new opportunities.
- Skills alignment: Matching training programmes with the specific competencies required by emerging sectors.
- Regional balance: Avoiding a concentration of growth only in already affluent areas.
Without reliable data, governments risk implementing policies that either overpromise new jobs or overlook the needs of workers at risk of displacement. The Tracker fills that evidence gap.
How it works
Data collection
JTJT pulls information from a variety of public and private sources:
- National labour statistics and census datasets.
- Companylevel reports on renewableenergy projects, green infrastructure and circulareconomy initiatives.
- Survey results from trade unions and industry associations.
- Academic research on skill requirements and wage trends.
Classification framework
Jobs are categorised using the Just Transition Classification System (JTCS), which distinguishes between:
- Direct green jobs: Positions directly involved in cleanenergy production, energy efficiency retrofits, sustainable transport, etc.
- Indirect support jobs: Roles in supply chains, financing, permitting, and technical services that enable the green sector.
- Transitionfacilitating jobs: Occupations focused on reskilling, community outreach and socialpolicy implementation.
Interactive visualisation
The web interface offers:
- Geographic heat maps showing job density by region.
- Timeline charts tracking growth or decline over the past decade.
- Filters for sector, skill level, gender balance, wage range and contract type.
- Downloadable CSV and JSON files for further analysis.
Key data (as of 2025)
Total identified justtransition jobs worldwide: 12.8million
Average annual growth rate (20202025): 7.2%
Sector share: Renewable energy (38%), Energy efficiency & retrofits (22%), Sustainable transport (15%), Circulareconomy manufacturing (13%), Other services (12%).
Gender balance: Women hold 42% of the documented roles, with the highest representation in greenconstruction (48%) and sustainablefinance (45%).
Average wage: $48k per year (median), with a 15% premium over comparable fossilfuel positions in the same region.
Regional highlights:
- Europe: 4.1m jobs; strong focus on offshore wind and retrofitting.
- North America: 3.2m jobs; rapid growth in electricvehicle supply chains.
- AsiaPacific: 4.0m jobs; large expansion in solar manufacturing and green hydrogen.
- Africa & Latin America: 1.5m jobs; emerging opportunities in communityscale renewable projects.
Impact and realworld stories
Data from the Tracker have already informed several policy decisions:
- Germanys 2024 ClimateJobs Act used regional heatmaps to allocate 3billion in training subsidies to coaldependent districts.
- Californias GreenWorkforce Initiative referenced wagegap analyses to set a minimum 10% wage uplift for workers transitioning from oilfield jobs.
- UNIDOs CircularEconomy Programme leveraged supplychain job counts to prioritize investments in Southeast Asian recycling hubs.
Case study Portland, Oregon:
When the city announced the closure of a 200MW naturalgas plant, the Tracker revealed 850 potential positions in nearby solarfarm construction and energyefficiency retrofits. By partnering with local community colleges, the city launched a fasttrack reskilling program that placed 620 displaced workers in new roles within twelve months, achieving a 92% retention rate after two years.
Future directions
To stay relevant as the climate agenda evolves, the Just Transition Jobs Tracker plans to:
- Integrate realtime data feeds from emerging gigeconomy platforms that support green services.
- Expand the JTCS to cover emerging sectors such as carboncapture deployment and climateadaptive agriculture.
- Develop an API that allows cities and NGOs to embed live visualisations directly into their own dashboards.
- Partner with AIdriven forecasting tools to model job creation under different policy scenarios.
- Increase granularity on socialequity metrics, tracking intersections of gender, ethnicity and disability.
Ultimately, the Tracker aspires to become the single source of truth for anyone seeking to understand and accelerate the employment side of the global shift to a sustainable economy.
