The Green Jobs Malaysia Project was born as a response to the call for support from the Government of Malaysia following the pledge made by Prime Minister Najib Tun Razak for a 40% reduction in Malaysia’s GHG emissions intensity by 2020, during the run up to the Climate Change Negotiations held in Copenhagen in 2009.

The Project which officially started in 2012 has taken a tripartite and broad-based approach to provide the ILO constituents, i.e. government, workers’ and employers’ organizations, and other stakeholders, the crucial information set and capacity to assess economy-employment and economy-environment linkages and as such identify entry points for further green jobs creation, helping propel the country towards its goal of a green(er) economy.

The Project has mapped out green jobs in key sectors of the economy namely: (1) agriculture, fishery and forestry; (2) energy; (3) water and waste management; (4) solid waste management; (5) transport; and (6) construction,, promoting better understanding of the prevalence and the characteristics of green jobs in Malaysia. It has likewise built a green expanded Malaysia DySAM providing a comprehensive set of accounts disaggregated between green, brown and mixed (hybrid) sectors in Malaysia allowing for analysis as well as policy support modelling crucial to charting the course in the transition to a green(er) economy.

The project has likewise taken a capacity-development approach, and not only have made available learning and training materials for green jobs mapping and analytical research such as DySAM but built capacities for these tasks among local experts from government, academe and other institutions.  It has tackled the issue of skills needs for the transition to the green economy and has worked towards building a methodology for identifying skills needs within DySAM.  Moreover, it is supporting the government and social partners by promoting awareness and greater understanding, hence, better compliance to national competency standards and national occupational skills standards relating to green technology and occupations.

In line with the foregoing, the Project intends to conduct a workshop to promote a wider dissemination of the results from green jobs mapping, the analytical research under DySAM including the modelling of scenarios, skills needs assessment as well as work on support to awareness raising and compliance to competency/occupational standards for green jobs, and findings, and with the end in view of supporting the tripartite partners to discuss employment implications and decide on policy options for  Malaysia’s overall development agenda.