One of the most crucial factors for any organization – business or nonprofit – is their ability to attract and retain the best available talent.

Leaders are also having to grapple with the fact that retaining staff is no longer a simple matter of pay packages and perks. The way an organization engages with social and political trends has become a vital element in attracting and keeping the great people you need to deliver on business goals.

Climate change, in particular, is fast becoming a decisive factor in influencing where great people want to work. If, as a senior executive, you can’t look your people in the eye and authentically tell them that you are acting at the right speed and scale to reduce emissions within your organization’s sphere of influence, why would you expect them to choose to stay at your company in the long-term?

After all, if you can’t say that, you are basically expecting your employees to be working to ruin our environment, health and safety, as well as the future wellbeing of the kids of today – and nobody wants to do that.

Candid Feedback Shows Optimism

Because of the role that I have as CEO of Greenpeace Australia Pacific, I often hear this feedback from established professionals and emerging talent alike, in candid conversations. These are folks who will likely never work for a climate or environmental campaigning organization like Greenpeace, but it’s still super important to them that in their work that they are contributing to the solution, rather than the problem.

I’ve also heard from multiple CEOs that when they have made appropriately ambitious commitments to reduce emissions at the speed and scale aligned with the Paris Agreement goal of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celcius, it has proved very popular with their teams.

“Best received email I ever sent”, is how the CEO of one major Australian company described the reaction to me, after he had announced his business was going to source all of its electricity from renewable sources, not fossil fuels, by 2025. Good for employee morale, and great for internal trust in the leadership of the company.

Choosing jobs and careers that are authentically part of the climate solution was the focus of a recent event: the Clean Energy Council Careers for Net Zero Fair, held in Melbourne, Australia. Convened with the promise of connecting professionals “with leading companies and organizations from various industries who contribute to the clean economy”, the event fizzed with optimism about the abundant opportunities in unlocking Australia’s clean energy potential on a systemic level – but also what it means for the countless individuals seeking purposeful careers.

It was genuinely exciting to see.

One of the people whom I met at the event was Anshuman Bapna, the Founder of climate careers platform Terra, which combines networking, skills development and job searching into a single platform. Bapna cites research that suggests that 100 million people will be needed to learn the necessary skills or to find new kinds of work this decade, if we are to transform our energy, agriculture, transport and finance systems at the emergency speed and scale that is now essential.

Bapna described the business this way: “Terra connects professionals with opportunities to learn the skills needed in a new climate economy, build new networks and work directly on climate. We screen out ‘greenwashed’ jobs to connect workers with opportunities to drive real positive change.”

Making the Right Choices

Whether it’s the positive feedback that CEOs receive when they take genuine action on climate, the success of events like the Careers for Net Zero Fair, the emergence of new businesses companies like Terra, or recent high-profile decisions by employees to quit jobs in climate-laggard companies, no CEO can ignore the clear lesson here: being an employer of choice means doing the right thing on climate, right now.

This trend is only going to become more pronounced as the impacts of climate change intensify.

Doing the right thing means doing the biggest thing that you can do, in your sector. Whether it’s committing to 100 percent renewable energy for their electricity needs – like, for example, retail giants Coles, Woolworths and Aldi have – or switching delivery fleets to all-electric vehicles like IKEA, every corporate leader, regardless of their sector, has the power to make the difference.

Greenpeace accepts no funding from any business or government so that our campaigning is always free from the perception of influence. And that independence also means giving credit where it is due.

It is also important to remember that there are many very low emissions jobs and careers that should also be celebrated as good for the climate, even if they are not part of the clean energy sector. Aged care workers and early childhood educators, for example, not only do vital, valuable care work that makes our societies stronger, and these sectors produce negligible emissions. Better support for these sectors must be part of any national shift to a low-emissions economy.

Genuine Change is Possible – And Worthwhile

On the other hand, we already know that the worst of the worst – the coal, oil and gas companies that are the main drivers of the climate change emergency – are finding it increasingly difficult to recruit, particularly at the graduate level. While some companies like AGL Energy are now helmed by leaders who genuinely want to make a change and who are driving the company to completely transition away from coal at speed, others are still engaging in greenwashing or incremental delay.

Leading an organization is never easy work, let alone through the complicated, unprecedented years that have transformed the very fabric and nature of work since the beginning of this decade.

But one simple truth shines through all the complexity: taking the bold, ambitious action to authentically align your organization’s operations with global climate goals is a win–win–win for your mission, your people and the planet.