Pittsburgh’s Green Economy Could Create 12,000 Jobs over Next Six Years

Southwestern Pennsylvania is on course to add 11,640 green jobs to its economy by 2015, according to a new report commissioned by two local organizations, the Green Building Alliance and Growing Technology through Energy and Community Health (GTECH) . The region’s green services sector is on the verge of a major boom and will be the driving force in the growth of the green economy, according to the report. The report is bullish about the future of Pittsburgh’s green economy, though it relies on a methodology intended to produce a more conservative estimate of green jobs than other approaches, the authors contend.

In order to maximize the growth of green sectors, the authors recommend that Pittsburgh implement a more coordinated and comprehensive strategy to prepare and train workers for green jobs.

Southwestern Pennsylvania is already home to 18,000 jobs in green industries, according to the report. Together with the additional newly created 11,640 jobs, the region’s employment could grow to 30,000 by 2015. The majority of these new jobs fall into the category of green services sector, which includes a variety of occupations that make use of green technologies. Green construction, consulting, installation, recycling and organic farming all fall into this sector. At the same time, the green products sector, currently the largest green sector, is expected to shrink by more than 50 percent. The report explains the decline as a reflection of a nationwide reduction in manufacturing jobs.

Over the past few years, counting green jobs and projecting the impact of green initiatives has proven to be a difficult and controversial process. To address this issue, the authors examine the share of a particular market that is green and use that share to calculate the percentage of jobs in that industry that can be considered green. This method can be used to project the growth of green jobs based on expansions and contractions of whole industries. By using this approach, the report avoids classifying whole industries as part of the green economy and instead focuses just on the green jobs within those industries.

Pittsburgh need for better coordination between its existing initiatives was singled out as a gap in the region’s current green economy. The report calls for improved partnerships between education and training programs at every step in the educational pipeline, together with linkages to green employers. The authors also call for an expansion in the region’s definition of green jobs to help leverage more federal funding for training initiatives.

The report represents the first step in designing a regional strategic plan to ensure the continuing growth of Southwestern Pennsylvania’s green economy and to position Pittsburgh as a national center for environmentally-conscious industry. Another effort is underway to produce a plan centered on the region’s various communities and their individual labor markets. The second phase of the plan will help the region deploy resources to train green workers and place them in high-quality green jobs.

Read “Southwestern Pennsylvania Green Jobs Analysis and Action Plan” at: http://www.pa-greenbuildingproducts.org/pdf/090814%20Green%20Jobs%20Report%20v.3.1.pdf.