Exploring labour market transitions towards the net-zero economy

The European Union’s (EUs) goal to achieve climate neutrality by 2050 will lead to an economy-wide transformation that will also affect labour markets, particularly in sectors that are more directly impacted by the climate transition. Because of the expected sectoral shifts in employment, it is important to gain insight into the sectoral mobility of workers. Thus, this paper contains an exploratory and descriptive analysis of the labour force in the impacted sectors between 2010 and 2020, investigating certain demographic indicators that may be relevant for labour mobility, such as age and gender. Next, we combine this data with calculations on sector-to-sector transitions. The findings indicate that the transforming sectors collectively employed around 30% of the EU labour market in 2023, with a balanced representation of age groups comparable to the average across all sectors. However, the transforming sectors are male-dominated, with women making up a much smaller share of employment compared to the economy-wide average. We find that younger workers in all countries demonstrate higher mobility compared to older workers, with variation across EU Member States. In terms of transitions between individual transforming sectors, we find that these happen most frequently between manufacturing and construction (in both directions). There is also a net inflow of workers into all of the transforming sectors, except for mining and extraction.