Green Horizons advances an equitable energy transition by closing critical green workforce gaps with talent from refugee and migrant communities.

Challenge

OECD economies face a projected shortage of 7 million green energy workers by 2030 for climate infrastructure deployment: installing renewable energy systems, retrofitting buildings, modernizing grids, and scaling clean transportation. These aren't financial or technological challenges – the constraint is execution capacity. Meanwhile, millions of displaced people globally possess the necessary skills. They're trained electricians, HVAC technicians, and construction specialists. 

Green Horizons connects these two realities.

Solution

We facilitate green skilled mobility, making climate investments deployable, by:

  • We blend philanthropic, public, and catalytic investment and deploy capital to green skills mobility projects that demonstrate potential for scale.

  • We highlight high-quality impact analyses of successful mobility programs and how they accelerate the green transition.

Why green skills labour mobility

Green skills labour mobility accelerates climate action while strengthening economies and transforming lives, linking urgent workforce needs in the green transition with inclusive opportunity for people across borders.

  • Labour mobility fills critical workforce gaps that allows mitigation investments to deploy at the speed required to meet targets. This isn’t theoretical: each additional migrant electrician installing rooftop solar PV in Europe is estimated to enable ~700-1,200 tCO₂ abatement across a nine-year modelling window.

  • For millions in climate-vulnerable regions, particularly in urban centres or refugee camps often overwhelmed by resource scarcity and inadequate infrastructure, labour migration offers an effective adaptation strategy. Upskilling and skills-matching, combined with planned, orderly migration for those who need to move, can improve economic resilience through 10-20x earnings increases, provide safe options for those in climate-vulnerable regions, and generate remittances that help fund household-level adaptation, such as flood-resistant housing, water infrastructure, livelihood diversification and education. In one study, refugees who migrated for skilled work sent an average of £311 per month in remittances.

  • Labour mobility advances the just transition by supporting displaced people to access meaningful job opportunities within the growing green workforce so that no one is left behind. Green Horizons advocates for programmes that include training or other benefits for host-country populations, following the net-benefit principles of Global Skills Partnerships, expanding access to quality training for all, while strengthening local economies.

  • Green skills labour mobility transforms livelihoods by enabling workers to increase their prospective lifetime earnings by 10–20 times while contributing complementary skills that improve infrastructure, services, and overall quality of life in the communities where they live and work.