Emerging skills needs in the environmental economy, labour shortages in critical sectors such as the construction sector and labour market changes have rendered up-skilling and reskilling efforts essential.
Without adequate support, the people most immediately exposed to these changes, who are already vulnerable and marginalised, risk being excluded from the changing labour market and further impacted by growing marginalisation and social exclusion.
Because of their proximity to their residents, local businesses, social services, educators and other relevant stakeholders, cities are well-positioned to develop and implement inclusive skills programmes.
Eurocities published a new cities trends paper that gathers opportunities and challenges for green skills provision in urban environments. The survey highlighted innovative strategies deployed by cities to reach vulnerable groups and upskill or reskill them and pointed to multifaceted challenges.
Local examples of a transition that leaves no one behind
All cities surveyed have initiatives to develop green skills targeting people from vulnerable communities, most with a focus on circularity and recycling. For example, Stockholm promotes recycling and re-using furniture and equipment that are no longer in use. Vulnerable groups, such as young people and/or long-term unemployed, are involved in renewing the office furniture for their future owners, which helps beneficiaries develop soft and vocational skills.
Similarly, Turku’s employment services provide supported employment for vulnerable groups in a circular economy. Turku also runs a large multidisciplinary Vocational Education Training that pilots apprenticeship programmes for those on low incomes and from basic educational backgrounds.
On the same lines, Malmo created an intranet service where furniture and household elements such as whiteboards or audiovisual equipment are traded within the municipality. The city also provides work training, job trails, and supported labour market employment placements explicitly targeting vulnerable groups such as people with mental health issues.
Lyon has developed a programme to create integrated employment pathways mainly to enable recipients of minimum-level income support to find sustainable and accessible employment in occupations and sectors in tension. Glasgow has developed specific interventions in its action plan to address the particular needs of individuals with protected characteristics, while Terrassa in Spain offers advice to promote social entrepreneurship for vulnerable groups.
What are cities advocating for?
The most common challenges among the surveyed municipalities are notably the persistent scarcity of human and financial resources, the complexity and fragmentation of skills systems, difficulty reaching out to vulnerable groups, and a lack of policy coordination among critical actors.
Cities are also not involved in the decision-making process despite their essential role in providing green skills to EU residents. Their participation could leverage their on-the-ground experience to formulate policies more responsive to the needs of local communities.
Additionally, national and European governments should formulate clear, comprehensive, consistent guidelines for developing green skills. Cities currently lack resources to train, upskill or reskill vulnerable groups. National efforts should urgently focus on training enough educators and developing curricula that mainstream ecological concerns and sustainability in schools, universities, and technical and vocational education and training institutions.
Generally, there is a need for enhanced policy coordination, institutionalised social dialogue and partnerships involving all relevant stakeholders to ensure the responsiveness of skills development programmes to labour market changes. Monitoring the green transition and its effects on specific groups and territories is primordial. This requires coordinating and building capacity for local labour market data collection.
And last but not least, municipal budgets alone are insufficient to ensure the sound development of initiatives targeting vulnerable groups. That’s why local governments advocate for accessing adequate, sustainable and long-term funding to provide green skills to vulnerable people.
Building cities’ capacity to collect such local labour market intelligence or localised data at the national level will allow cities to better understand local skills needs, anticipate the effects of the green transition on the labour market and tailor their policy response accordingly.
Read more in the report.
