Efforts to create environmentally sustainable economies have created millions of new jobs worldwide, concludes a new study unveiled last week by the Worldwatch Institute, a Washington, DC based research organization.

The study, “Working for the Environment: A Growing Source of Jobs,” rejects arguments that environmentally friendly economies mean a loss of jobs. In fact, creating green economies will actually spark a boom in job growth, the study concludes.

“Investing in renewable energy, using energy and materials more efficiently, and designing products to be more durable and repairable will generate more jobs than continuing to invest in extractive industries and fossil fuels,” said Michael Renner, the study’s chief author. “The challenge to society is to provide a just transition for workers who will lose jobs in industries like fossil fuels and mining.”

According to Renner and the Worldwatch Institute, efforts to create an environmentally sustainable economy have already generated an estimated 14 million jobs worldwide, with the promise of millions more in the 21st century.

Some of the most rapid job growth is taking place in the development of wind-generated electricity, solar photovoltaics, and the expansion of recycling and remanufacturing, the study found. For example, the study found that:

In 1999, there were an estimated 86,000 jobs worldwide in manufacturing and installing wind turbines, a number that has doubled in the last two years. By 2020, wind power may account for 10 percent of all electricity generation and employ some 1.7 million people.

The US solar photovoltaic industry directly employs nearly 20,000 people now. European solar thermal companies employ more than 10,000 people, a number that could grow by at least 70,000 in the next decade, and perhaps to 250,000 with strong governmental support.

The worldwide recycling industry now processes more than 600 million tons of materials annually, has an annual turnover of $160 billion, and employs more than 1.5 million people.

In the United States, remanufacturing is already a $53 billion per-year business and employs some 480,000 people directly-double the number of jobs in the US steel industry.

Other areas of job growth linked to efforts to establish sustainable economies include recycling and the remanufacturing of goods, the study found.

Renner acknowledged that jobs in the logging, mining and other extractive industries are being phased out. But those industries provide only a small number of jobs to begin with, while accounting for some 84 percent of all the toxic pollutants released in the United States each year, Renner said.

But workers in the extractive industries cannot blame environmentalists for all of their job related woes, Renner said. Renner noted that most mining and logging jobs are at risk even in the absence of tougher environmental laws, and increasing mechanization and automation have translated into fewer jobs, even as output continues to rise. For example, from 1980 to 1999, US coal extraction rose 32 percent, but employment fell 66 percent, the Worldwatch Institute study notes. In the European Union’s chemical industry, production grew by 25 percent from 1990 to 1998, but jobs declined by 14 percent, the study found.

“Jobs are more likely to be at risk where environmental standards are low and where innovation in favor of cleaner technologies is lagging,” Renner said. “Our research shows that a huge potential to create jobs (exists) outside the extractive industries—jobs that do not depend on processing enormous one-way flows of raw materials and turning natural resources into mountains of waste.”

According to Renner, boosting the efficiency with which resources are used could save hundreds of billions of dollars that would otherwise go into purchasing fuels and raw materials. Investing that money into more environmentally benign sectors of the economy will generate more jobs than investing it in resource extractive industries, he said.

But that is difficult to do—especially in this era of free trade, Renner acknowledged.

“The trouble is that human labor appears too expensive, while energy and raw material inputs appear dirt cheap,” said Renner. “Businesses have long sought to compete by economizing on their use of labor. To build a sustainable economy, we need to economize on the use of energy and materials instead.”

Fiscal policy can be a powerful tool for increasing the productivity of energy and materials, Renner said. Current tax systems are misguided, because they encourage high resource use and discourage job creation, he explained. An ecologically driven reform of tax policy would reduce payroll taxes while simultaneously raising taxes on resources use and pollution, he said.

It is also important for labor unions and environmentalists to work together in order to build a stronger political base, said Renner, who noted that environmental dangers often translate into health and safety issues at the workplace.

“Strong, independent unions are far more likely to engage in a serious give-and-take on what it takes to create a sustainable workplace than weak, embattled ones,” said Renner. “Environmentalists should be supporting labor rights and endorsing measures that give worker representatives a meaningful voice in determining how environmental issues are being dealt with.”