Green Jobs

One of the six strategic objectives under the Mongolian National Green Development Policy is promoting green jobs.  Under the International Labour Organization’s (ILO) definition “green jobs” combine the characteristics of social responsibility, providing decent wage and social protection, and environmental sustainability.

The EPCRC completed Mongolia’s first green jobs mapping study in 2014 at the request of PAGE (ILO, Ministry of Environment and Green Development at that time).    This mapping study quantified existing green jobs, mapped these jobsacross economic sectors and subsectors as well as geographical areas and identified the work deficits in other jobs.

Download: “Mongolia: Green Jobs Mapping 2014”

In 2017, a pilot survey to estimate the demand for green jobs in Mongolia for the first time, in line with international methodologies, was completed by the Mongolian National Statistics Office, the International Labour Organization (ILO), and PAGE. 

The survey estimated there were 112.3 thousand green jobs throughout the country in the second quarter of 2016, which represented 9.9% of all jobs in Mongolia (at the time). Whilst this was the first survey of its kind in Mongolia, the thorough methodology used by the researchers laid the ground for future evaluations. Indeed, monitoring the trends in green jobs is a way to ensure that Mongolia’s transition to a green economy is more widely discussed.

This pilot survey also provides some useful insights into the distribution of green jobs throughout the Mongolian economy.  The results indicate that 30.3% of all green jobs are in education, 15.9% are in manufacturing, 9.4% in mining and 6.2% in management. While education is, of course, an investment for the future, it is hopeful that the proportion of green jobs will progressively shift towards sectors where the need for environmental (and social) sustainability are the most urgent.  This is particularly true of the mining sector, given Mongolia’s reliance on this sector for economic growth.