While admitting that investment in energy-efficient and renewable technologies sometimes has a "trade-off" in short-term economic growth, the researchers claim that it also creates more jobs than would be made otherwise, and that the costs of such jobs fall with continued investment over time.

"This paper provides an additional argument for policy makers to promote renewables," said Nicola Cantore of the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO) in Austria. "Renewables must be promoted not just because they are environment-friendly, but also because they provide jobs and they provide jobs at cheaper prices if compared to fossil fuels."

Greenhouse-gas emissions are rising much faster in the developing than the developed world. Investment in energy efficiency and renewables is often promoted as an opportunity, reducing reliance on energy imports and cleaning up the energy supply in the regions likely to be most affected by climate change. Many policy experts also claim that renewable energy will transform the jobs market in developing regions.

But as Cantore and colleagues point out in their paper in Environmental Research Letters (ERL), there is often "little substantiation" for such claims. Partly this is because "most published figures stem from institutions with a partial view on renewables and/or a mandate to promote those", according to Cantore. But also, the impact on jobs from renewables is hard to estimate.

In 2010, two of Cantore’s coauthors from the US, Max Wei of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Dan Kammen of the University of California, Berkeley, developed a framework to calculate the job impact of renewables in the US, using parameters from the existing peer-reviewed literature. Now, working with Cantore and Patrick Nussbaumer at UNIDO, Wei and Kammen have applied that framework to Africa using a multiplier – again borrowed from the literature – that scales up job creation for the continent based on its lower productivity.

"Africa is less productive than the US, so the hypothesis is that [African nations] need more labour to produce the same quantity of electricity," explained Cantore. "This hypothesis is reflected [in] the conversion factors that we adopt."

The researchers did find evidence that short-term growth would be curtailed by renewable energy, as it is still in many instances more expensive than traditional fossil-fuel energy, even though prices are falling. But the team also found that renewables and energy-efficient industries are better for employment, and that the cost of job creation compared with that for fossil fuels decreases when renewable energy and energy efficiency become more prevalent.

"From a policy perspective, these results suggest justification for a fuller integration of green technologies beyond the traditional boundaries of environmental policy," the researchers wrote.

Cantore says that he and his colleagues are now hoping to perform similar analyses for other continents, and down to a country level.

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