4 Your Career, Our Future 4.4 Conclusion


Creating job opportunities for young people while taking action to reach our environmental and social goals is absolutely needed to achieve the SDGs. Youth unemployment or underemployment, and the need for decent work (especially in the case of rural youth) are a global challenge will grow over the next decade. At the same time, environmental problems and climate change are serious threats to the future of jobs and could make existing inequalities worse.


Moving from a linear to a circular economy will create new types of jobs. Before we reach that point, though, we have to take a number of important steps in the direction of transformative change. Moving towards eco- innovation and using green technologies with supportive and improved education (including vocational training) will be crucial. Unequal access to quality education and Internet has proved to be a defining and limiting factor during the COVID-19 pandemic.


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Without the right skills and resources, we won’t be able to transition to green jobs. Young people need access to good information sources and to anticipate their need for new knowledge, skills and competencies in this green jobs marketplace. We do not know what these new jobs of the future will look like, but the evolving nature of green job skills provides an exciting opportunity for youth to adjust their current skills to suit the future jobs market.


Moving from a linear economy to a circular one can provide the world’s youth with ways to innovate, inspire, and solve our toughest environmental problems. Many of you will make career choices in the coming years. Hopefully they will be in the areas of sustainable resource use, product life cycle design, waste management, and others mentioned in this chapter. For a green career, you will need to find out about:


• jobs and entrepreneurial opportunities that already exist or are coming with this new green and circular economy;


• jobs and entrepreneurial opportunities that could exist in a green or circular economy, but do not exist now;


• the education, skills and competencies you need to take advantage of these new jobs; and


• which schools will help you get the education, skills and competencies that you need.


Given the speed with which this change needs to happen and the risks and uncertainties we face, it is impossible to predict all the problems we will need to solve in the future. We can hope for a new type of circular economy in the future, prioritize social well-being and innovation-led development and the different ways to reach the SDGs to help us reach a healthy planet and healthy people within a generation. Your green(er) career choices will have a big impact on that future as well as the one of your family, but also the future of our world.


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