Journal article
Jobs, Skills and Regional Implications of the Low Carbon Residential Heat Transition in the UK
11 March 2025
Richard Hanna, Philip Heptonstall and Robert Gross have won a Best Paper Award in the journal Sustainability Science for their paper titled ‘Job creation in a low carbon transition to renewables and energy efficiency: a review of international evidence’. For 2024, three winning papers were selected from 147 eligible papers published in Sustainability Science. The annual awards recognise the contributions of researchers that further enhance understanding of sustainability science and demonstrate high-quality scientific standards, rewarding diligent work beyond a citation count and other article metrics.
The paper was led by Richard Hanna for UKERC’s Technology and Policy Assessment team, and has been cited 64 times in Google Scholar. It presents a systematic, international review of job creation and displacement impacts of energy sector decarbonisation. The analysis indicates that overall, investment in renewable energy and energy efficiency can deliver more jobs than equivalent investment in gas or coal power generation, and modest net employment growth at a national scale. It also highlights a lack of metrics and data in the literature on job quality, skills, and the geographic distribution of employment impacts in decarbonising energy systems, and these should be priority areas for further research.