While Australian politicians continue to take the slowly-slowly approach to tackling climate change, the lack of coordinated national policies to scale the clean energy industry to secure jobs, manufacturing capacity, and research and development, is setting us even further behind.

According to last month's Zero Carbon Australia Stationary Energy Plan by Beyond Zero Emissions, Australia's shift to a low-carbon economy from 2010 to 2020 will create just over 80,000 jobs from installation of renewable energy infrastructure at the peak of construction, plus over 45,000 continuing jobs in operations and maintenance.

But do we have the capability and skill in Australia to deliver these projects?

A new report yet to be released from the Workplace Research Centre (WRC) in the faculty of economics and business in the University of Sydney has found more 'green collar' jobs are needed if key climate change challenges facing the Australian economy are to be met.

Commissioned by International Labour Organisation (ILO), the Skills for Green Jobs in Australia report, by Dr Mike Rafferty and Serena Yu, focuses on the potential employment impacts of moving to a low-carbon economy and considers (among other issues) supporting the emergence of new jobs in rising industries such as the renewable energy sector; and the 'greening' of established jobs.

The summary version of the report highlights the importance of regulatory certainty and consistency in driving market demand, the role of government incentives to drive behavioural and business change, the importance of industry and government collaboration to foster development and commercialisation of technologies, and of design and delivery of training courses – all, it says, are vital in ensuring that green collar jobs and skills continue to develop.

The research also finds that Australia is well positioned to take advantage of growth in lower-emission goods and services, particularly in the renewable energy and land and water resource management.

In Australia, however, there remains no agreed upon definition for ‘green’ occupations, which makes it very difficult to estimate what new and emerging occupations currently exist, or are likely to be created with various green economy plans.

Looking further afield, The United Nations Environment Program has defined a 'green job' as one that contributes substantially to preserving or restoring environmental quality.

The United States Department of Labour has taken a unique and interesting approach by defining three main employment areas:

– Green Growth Occupation: Existing occupations expected to increase in demand due to the addition of greener processes. Some new skills are expected to be needed.

– Green Enhanced Occupation: Existing occupations that will experience significant change in work and worker skill requirements.

– Green New & Emerging Occupation: Unique new work and worker skill requirements. Will result in new occupations.

The debate around the creation and nurturing of green jobs has certainly had its fair share of media attention in the US. Democrat Senator Jeff Bingaman, who is also chairman of the Senate Energy & Natural Resource Committee, called last week for the establishment of a federal Clean Energy Deployment Administration. In an op-ed on Politico.com, Bingaman argued that the US could not compete in the 'green race' using R&D and technological breakthroughs alone, and needed stronger policies to scale its clean energy industry through direct deployment and manufacturing, thus attracting more R&D in the long term.

In The New York Times, also last week, Thomas Friedman argued that China is doing a better job of securing clean energy jobs than the US due to stronger domestic demand arising from effective government policies.

And in July, Intel co-founder Andy Grove said in an interview with BusinessWeek that Asian countries "seem to understand that job creation must be the number one objective of state economic policy. The government plays a strategic role in setting the priorities and arraying the forces and organisation necessary to achieve this goal. The rapid development of the Asian economies provides numerous illustrations."

A report by the Australia Institute, meanwhile, says that what seems to be missing from the preoccupation with green jobs is an understanding that all economic activity creates jobs. Moving to a low-carbon economy may well involve reducing jobs in industries that produce fossil fuels, but it will also create them in renewable energy industries.

For Australia, a comprehensive taxonomy to capture and measure where we are at in the shift to a low-carbon economy, and where we need to be, would be a good start, to help implement more ambitious initiatives and meet our key climate and economic goals.

Lisa Tarry is managing director of sustainable recruitment agency Turning Green