Addressing climate change is a crucial—and sizeable—economic task. Ensuring equity in every dimension of climate mitigation and adaptation is critical to redressing ongoing harms and environmental injustices. Tracking the implementation of signature climate legislation such as the Inflation Reduction Act and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, both of which include federal investments to bolster the U.S. clean energy economy, and studying how these laws affect local communities and industries differently is one essential way to ensure equitable outcomes.

U.S. climate policy must also ensure that green infrastructure and jobs are “just,” in that they support front-line communities both historically and currently exposed to the negative consequences of an inequitable system, as well as those workers transitioning from employment in extractive industries who are especially vulnerable to economic risk in the transition. Many of the incentives in the two aforementioned laws will serve to create hundreds of thousands of new green jobs in the U.S. economy—as many as 912,000 per year over the next decade, according to some estimates. A recent study also shows that these jobs tend to be higher-paying than fossil-fuel jobs and tend to be plentiful in communities with fossil fuel extraction industries, two encouraging findings.

Similarly, we need more research and data to better understand the impacts of climate change on labor outcomes, such as employment, job quality, and workplace hazards, as well as on mortality, health, and well-being—and we need more and better data that looks at all of these outcomes across racial and ethnic groups, industries, and geographic regions. This multidisciplinary work can inform policy responses and debates across the environmental, energy, and climate justice movements, as well as within the economics and industrial policy fields.

Climate policy also has the potential to spur economic growth and ensure the U.S. economy remains competitive and resilient. That is why Equitable Growth is committed to fostering more research in this important area that will continue to dramatically shape the U.S. economy and labor market, as well as worker and family well-being, in the coming years and decades. Climate economics is a burgeoning area of interest for Equitable Growth, which has and will continue to fund research on the various economic impacts of climate change and also recently brought on a visiting scholar, environmental economist R. Jisung Park of the University of Pennsylvania, to help expand our work in this space.

Read the full article about climate policy has potential to spur economic growth at Washington Center for Equitable Growth.