by Christophe A. G. Tulou | How many people does it take to screw in a high-efficiency LED light bulb?  How many to plant and maintain a vegetated green roof?  Install solar panels on a rooftop?  Weatherize a house?  Install a rain garden?

Since all these activities are happening now in the District of Columbia, wouldn’t it be good to know?  Especially since they represent a new wave of job-creating, environmentally-friendly activities called a “green economy”?

According to a Brookings Institution’s report, Sizing the Clean Economy, the Washington, DC metropolitan area ranks fourth among 100 of the largest metropolitan areas in the US in the growing green economy, which totaled 70,828 clean jobs in 2010. The District had (employed 22,462 people in clean jobs) 22,462 clean jobs in 2010 (with a 1.5% annual growth rate from 2003 to 2010).

As part of Mayor Vincent C. Gray’s Sustainable DC initiative, growing the green economy and the jobs it creates is front-and-center.  The Mayor has made clear he plans to establish the District as the nation’s healthiest, greenest and most livable city.  DDOE and other agencies are already working hard to make this a reality.  Last year, DDOE established—pursuant to DC Council’s forward-focused Clean and Affordable Energy Act—the DC Sustainable Energy Utility (DC SEU), one of the first of its kind in the country. The DC SEU is a private contractor that develops, coordinates, and provides programs that promote the sustainable use of energy in the District.   Its job is simple enough:  reduce per capita energy consumption by one percent per year; reduce the peak demand for energy; reduce energy consumption by the District’s highest energy users; encourage robust adoption of renewable energy; focus particularly on low-income communities, and create green jobs.  Green jobs include the jobs of people who audit energy use in buildings, put in weather stripping, add the insulation, replace drafty windows, install high-efficiency furnaces and air conditioners, install solar units, and . . .yes. . . replace inefficient light bulbs.

In five short months in 2011, the DC SEU created employment for 357 District residents as temporary field staff, permanent office staff, and project-specific implementation contractors. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.  The DC SEU is obliged to increase those jobs each year as it invests more in the District’s energy reliability, security, innovation, and efficiency. Additionally, almost 75% of the funds paid to green jobs contractors went to the District’s Certified Business Enterprise (CBE) contractors.

Through Mayor Gray’s Sustainable DC initiative—which has engaged over a thousand citizens to help define our sustainable future—many ideas are surfacing that could substantially build on our solid fourth-place green economy foundation.  Among suggestions under active consideration are:  urban farms on vacant spaces and rooftops; significant improvements in building energy efficiencies; more renewable energy installations; a smart electric grid; millions of additional square feet of green roofs; green streets and alleys; LED street lighting throughout the city; many more electric vehicle charging stations, streetcars, more bike lanes; recycling and composting facilities; and the list goes on.

All these steps move us toward that healthy, green and livable city the Mayor envisions, and all create jobs.  Many are highly accessible jobs—such as planting and nurturing the over one million square feet, or nearly 30 acres, of green rooftops already in place—and others require more specialized capabilities, like weatherization and renewable energy installations, which our universities and community college, and community-based organizations are poised to teach. Come to think of it, we are not just talking green jobs; we are plotting green careers.

Just imagine what we can create with our collective imaginations, creativity, and hard work.

Christophe A. G. Tulou is the Director of District Department of the Environment.

by Robert D. Hormats | Leaders from around the globe will gather this upcoming June in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil for the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development or Rio+20.  The conference provides a venue for governments and stakeholders to consider cross-cutting global environment, development, and economic needs.  Indeed, there is much to be discussed.  The population of the world is seven billion, of which almost one-seventh go hungry every day, one-fourth do not have access to electricity, and one-fifth live in areas where water is scarce.  In addition, approximately one-third of the world’s biodiversity has been lost since 1970, three-fourths of the world’s marine fisheries are fully or over exploited, and two-fifths of the planet’s original forests are gone.

Rio+20 marks a new foundation for engaging the global community to build greener and more inclusive economies, smarter cities, and to strengthen institutions and networks to address current and future challenges.  The Obama Administration has set a strong foundation and trajectory for enhancing sustainability and building a green economy at home and abroad. Our Global Development Policy recognizes that sustainable development offers a promise of long-term, inclusive, and enduring growth that builds on accountability, effectiveness, efficiency, coordination, and innovation.  The United States’ approach to Rio+20 is focused on three key areas:

1. The Built Environment: Clean Energy and Urbanization – Energy is vital for the function of businesses, factories, farms, and schools. Energy security challenges are therefore directly linked to advancing economic development in many countries, especially to reach the 1.3 billion people who do not have access to electricity.  We are using development resources to create markets that attract private sector energy-related investments to underserved populations.  On the demand side, we are connecting the conservation of natural resources to profitability, thereby protecting the environment and freeing business resources for other types of job creating activities.  Urban centers, in particular, offer the opportunity to capture these types of cross-cutting efficiencies.

2. The Natural Environment: Ecosystems Management and Rural Development – Nearly one billion people worldwide suffer from chronic hunger. To increase food yields and nutrition with fewer inputs and smaller impacts on the environment, we need both innovative agricultural technologies and improved understanding of agricultural systems—as well as integrated resource management of our terrestrial, freshwater, and marine ecosystems.  We are extending support for sustainable, agriculture-led growth that will help lift people out of poverty through the U.S. global hunger and food security initiative, Feed the Future.

3. The Institutional Environment: Modernizing Global Cooperation – The Internet, social media, and other connection technologies allow us to transcend the walls of traditional institutions, fostering truly global collaboration.  By embracing twenty-first century connectivity, we can deploy the collective ingenuity and capability of governments, citizens, businesses, and civil society stakeholders from around the world to promote economic development and sustainable environmental practices.  In addition, we can enhance national governance capacity in an inclusive manner by improving transparency, public participation in decision making, accountability, and institutional arrangements for effective implementation and enforcement.

The Rio+20 conference offers a chance to come together and consider the needs of our people and planet.  How we deal with this moment—whether we succumb to a zero-sum competition over increasingly limited resources or cooperate with each other to build green economies—will determine in large part the security and prosperity of America and the world in the twenty-first century.  Mobilizing our greatest asset, the collective capacity and strength of our citizens is vital to our success.

Robert D. Hormats is Under Secretary of State for Economic Growth, Energy, and the Environment.

by Paul T. Anastas, Ph.D | Administrator Lisa P. Jackson has said time and again that science is the backbone of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The agency depends upon its scientists and engineers, together with an extensive network of their research colleagues — supported through agency partnerships, grants, awards, and fellowships — to provide the high caliber research, analysis and assessments needed to protect human health and the environment.

For 40 years, EPA has been a world leader in scientific research in human health and environmental protection. Agency science has played a critical role in landmark environmental achievements that have made a real difference, particularly for those living in urban communities such as Washington DC. EPA science led to actions to greatly reduce exposures to secondhand tobacco smoke, remove lead from gasoline, reduce air pollution, and lower the risk from exposures to toxins in the environment. The cumulative benefits have reduced contamination, decreased pollution, restored ecosystems, improved public health, and increased overall life expectancy for all Americans.

Building on that legacy, EPA science is now poised to advance human health and environmental protection on a path toward sustainability.  Agency research leaders have been working together and engaging stakeholders to build an overall research portfolio that will leverage EPA’s science efforts to meet the information needs of the EPA and its partners, while simultaneously advancing environmental solutions for a sustainable future.

EPA scientists are erasing the boundaries between scientific disciplines to create a set of integrated, trans-disciplinary research programs: air, climate and energy; safe and sustainable water resources; sustainable and healthy communities; chemical safety for sustainability; human health risk assessment; and homeland security research.

The realigned research plan aims to approach environmental challenges with a holistic, systems perspective. It will allow the agency to continue providing the high caliber science and engineering solutions needed to meet local and national environmental challenges in a cost-effective manner. In an era of challenging budgets, EPA’s new integrated research approach toward sustainability will bring cutting-edge science results to bear faster and more efficiently.

The end result of EPA’s science efforts will be to continue to build on the agency’s legacy of achievement, while helping communities across the United States protect their environment and move forward on a path toward a sustainable future.

Paul T. Anastas is the Assistant Administrator for the U.S. EPA’s Office of Research and Development. To learn more about EPA’s science and technology efforts please visitwww.epa.gov/research.

by Mark Muro | For all the debate, speculation, and controversy that have surrounded the hoped-for growth of the so-called “clean” economy and “green jobs” one thing has been in pretty short supply: facts.

For all the talk of its alluring promise, the clean or green economy remains an enigma in large part due to the continued absence of standard national definitions and data.

That changed with a recent report assessing the current nature, size, and growth of the “green” or “clean” economy in U.S. regions. Developed by the Brookings Metropolitan Policy Program in partnership with Battelle’s Technology Partnership Practice, our report and its underlying database titled, “Sizing the Clean Economy,” are not perfect accountings. Still, they offer a compelling new national and metropolitan look at a sector of the economy that has remained at once an important aspiration and a frustrating enigma.  Look over the report, watch the video of the discussion, and check out the special interactive mapping tool developed — all aimed at shedding further light on the geography of this hard-to-assess sector.

Over the past year, we’ve developed and analyzed a detailed database of establishment-level employment statistics pertaining to a sensibly defined assemblage of low-carbon and environmentally oriented industries in the United States and its metropolitan areas.

Covering the years 2003 to 2010 for larger U.S. metropolitan areas, the resulting information provides a new source of timely information that is both consistently applied so as to allow cross-region comparisons but detailed enough to be of some use to inform national, state, and regional leaders on the dynamics of the U.S. low-carbon and environmental goods and services super-sector as they are transpiring in U.S. regions.

To be sure, localized drill-downs in particular places may capture a fuller profile in some regions. But overall, our new information provides what we believe is a plausible, useful, first-of-its-kind measure of the size and growth of the clean economy as it is occurring in the nation’s 100 largest metropolitan areas.

It’s time that all U.S. regions begin to have access to some at least rough order-of-magnitude facts about the size and shape of their clean economies.

Mark Muro is Senior Fellow and Policy Director of Metropolitan Policy Program at the Brookings Institute.

by Howard Ways, AICP | Much of the recent national discourse around the green economy centers on the success or failure of individual companies like Solydra. While there are several factors that contribute to the profitability of a business, local economies are an intricate, complex web of market sector forces and public sector policies. With less national fanfare, cities like the District of Columbia have made tremendous strides in transforming local economies into more green economies.

Unlike the industrial or information economies before, the green economy is, at its core, a restorative economy. The near consensus in the scientific community is that the earth’s weather patterns and temperature have changed over the last 50 years and much of the evidence points to human settlement patterns as a root cause of these changes. A green economy can help slow the pace of environmental change, reverse the harmful trends of the last half century, improve complex ecosystems, and restore natural habitat.

Many metrics are used to measure the impact of the green economy – for example, the percentage of municipal waste that gets recycled or composted, the number of green buildings constructed, the percentage of people who commute to work by walking, biking or public transit. However, it is green jobs that often emerge as the top measurable output of the green economy.

If ten people are asked what a green job is, they may provide ten different responses.  However, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) defines green jobs as either:

Jobs in businesses that produce goods or provide services that benefit the environment or conserve natural resources or

Jobs in which workers’ duties involve making their establishment’s production processes more environmentally friendly or use fewer natural resources.

Many studies, including the District’s 2009 Green Collar Job Demand Analysis and the U.S. Conference of Mayors 2006 Metro Green Jobs Report, estimate the number of green jobs in the District to be between 22,000 and 25,000, or about 4% of all jobs in the city. The composition of these jobs reflects trends within the larger labor pool, with many of the District’s green jobs in construction, real estate, engineering, design, and law. A higher percentage of green jobs in the District require a bachelor’s degree than in most cities.

As green business practices become more commonplace, the studies project nearly 200,000 green jobs being created over 25 years. The District, with its educated workforce and progressive public policies, is poised to remain a leader in the green economy.

Howard Ways is the Director of Planning and Sustainability at the University of the District of Columbia.

by Rebecca Stack | With the RiverSmart brand the District has received great praise and recognition from residents and officials. It is first and foremost the helpful, giving face, of local government. The programs educate, empower, and financially assist, property owners to become better environmental stewards. What we don’t often herald, is the entry level introduction many of our residents are receiving as they participate as workers in these incentive programs. They are helping to create the District’s green economy.

Installing a rain barrel, planting a tree, or weeding a rain garden, these jobs require modest training, and build competitive working skills. While discussions on the value of the emerging green economy is often focused on the energy sector and the high skill, high paying areas that require equally high levels of education, these DDOE initiatives offer District workers access and stepping stones into the world of work itself. We expect as the RiverSmart brand expands it will continue to stimulate the market for innovative on-site stormwater management technologies and in turn continue to expand the job market for those who provide, install, and maintain these technologies.

Incentive programs are but one of the many drivers for green jobs in the District. More controversial may be the role of environmental regulations. There are those that contend regulations stifle the economy but the 2011 United Nations Environmental Program “Green Economy Report” makes a clear case, on the world stage, for the essential role of governments to transition from grey to green, and highlights not only the compatibility, but the necessity, between this transition and continued economic growth. Tiny increases in investment foster this shift and will support emerging green jobs sectors such as urban food production, green buildings, tree canopy growth and maintenance, eco-tourism, and small distributed water and waste management approaches.

As DDOE responds to Federal demands to provide even greater protection to our natural resources, economic analysis of the increasingly protective regulations suggests there will be a similarly small increase in investment required, by some measures, less than one tenth of one percent. As requirements for the inclusion of green infrastructure on public and private development grow, the expansion of the job market for those who provide, install, and maintain these technologies will follow.

The District has many green assets. How those that live and work here grow and manage those assets will determine the ecological, economic and cultural returns. In this capital city our green infrastructure can provide the underlying foundation for the growth of a healthy community with many employment opportunities across many spheres of work.

Rebecca Stack is a Low Impact Development (LID) Specialist in the Watershed Protection Division at DDOE.

by Polina Bakhteiarov | These days, almost anywhere you go, the green economy is a hot topic. But at many American universities, few courses focus on the “triple bottom line” of sustainability to comprehensively examine the interrelationships between the environment, economy, and community equity. Furthermore, there is a lack of practical training on sustainability issues, and sustainability is often segregated into an isolated academic pursuit in place of full integration into students’ lives.

The green economy is not just about making businesses green; it also provides a framework for reducing disparities within and across our communities. And while many college classes focus on two of the three aspects of the triple bottom line – environment and economy – the third aspect, equity, is often overlooked: there is limited opportunity in the mainstream curriculum to explore historic inequality in housing, education, healthcare, and the job market. Without tackling issues of equity, we miss a critical opportunity to educate students on the potential of sustainable approaches not only to “green” our society and create jobs, but also to improve communities and foster equality. As a result, college graduates emerge unprepared to fully embrace all that sustainability has to offer, including the potential to improve quality of life while growing labor force participation and developing local, regional, and national economies.

So how do we turn the tide and begin to prepare young people to embrace the full range of potential benefits in the green economy? First, we address college curricula and ensure that broad sustainability concepts, including economy, environment, and equity, are incorporated into core classes and institutionalized across disciplines such as management, engineering, and public policy. Second, we instill green habits in students’ daily routines using a diverse and innovative toolkit of sustainability practices, including:

• Competitions among or within university campuses to reduce energy and water use
• Accessible and enjoyable walking and biking routes (with sufficient bike parking) throughout the campus to discourage automobile use
• Campus-wide recycling and composting training, infrastructure, and enforcement
• On-campus food production (using campus compost as fertilizer) and farmers markets

Third, we invest in practical learning. Students with an interest in sustainability should have opportunities to participate in hands-on instruction in areas such as weatherization, recycling and waste management, and other experiential learning. Thus, through practical experience, a focus on education and behavior change, and inter-disciplinary curriculum development, the next generation will be well prepared to live, work, and succeed in the new green economy.

Polina Bakhteiarov is a Capital City Fellow in DDOE’s Office of Policy and Sustainability. She is a recent graduate of the Master in City Planning program at MIT, where she concentrated in community and economic development.