Over the past few years the employment creation potential of activities beneficial to the environment has been receiving increasing attention through the term of ‘green jobs”. These jobs are often understood to be those involving the implementation of measures that reduce carbon emissions or help realise alternative sources of energy use in developed economies. This paper explores the potential for governments to create “green jobs” and align poverty reduction and employment creation in developing countries with a broader set of investments in environmental conservation and rehabilitation to also preserve biodiversity, restore degraded land, combat erosion, and remove invasive aliens etc. In many cases, environmental degradation has a devastating direct effect on the poor, whether they themselves are the main cause of this degradation or not, and indications are that well designed interventions can contribute directly to the poverty-environment nexus by allowing income generated from environmental activities to ease the pressure on generating income through exploiting the environment. Environmental sector targeted public employment programmes can also be deployed to specifically address environmental concerns and create employment for the poor at the same time.
The paper draws heavily on the experiences on the Working for Water programme in South Africa because of the size and longevity of the programme and the extensive research and it has been subjected to. It continues by presenting an overview of the types of environmental activities that could be included in such programmes, and explores issues relating to how the programmes are prioritised, limitations with regards to estimating the costs and benefits, and in light of this, the paper considers how different types of funding and implementation strategies and mechanisms might be deployed and/or combined to enable these investments to take place and maximise employment and environmental benefits.