Maintenance of public and private urban green infrastructure provides significant employment in Eastern Cape towns, South Africa

Highlights

• The number and nature of jobs associated with maintenance of UGI are quantified.

• This was done for 12 towns of varying size and economic base.

• There were 17,429 jobs across the 12 towns earning approx. ZAR503 million p.a.

• 62 % were in the informal sector, 18 % in the public and 20 % in the private sectors.

• The number of jobs was strongly linked to town size and level of development.

• Such job numbers are significant in the context of high unemployment.

Abstract

Urban green infrastructure (UGI) provides numerous environmental, social and economic benefits through direct and indirect use of ecosystem services. The maintenance of UGI also provides work opportunities for skilled and unskilled workers in the public and private sectors, so-called green collar jobs. However, the extent and benefit of such employment has rarely been examined, especially in a developing country context where unemployment is often high. We quantified the number of green collar jobs and wage levels across all green collar categories in 12 towns of the Eastern Cape via means of questionnaires and interviews. Overall, we enumerated 17 429 jobs, receiving approximately ZAR503 million (US$37 million) per year. The number of jobs was strongly linked to town size, but the number of jobs per unit area was inversely related to the level of underdevelopment or deprivation per town. Two-thirds of the jobs were in the informal sector in the form of low-skilled workers acting as gardeners to middle- and upper-income households. The remainder were split more or less equally between the formal private and public sectors. The nature of private and public sector jobs varied in relation to the broader macro-economy of each town. Thus, the provision and maintenance of UGI in towns and cities of the developing world can be seen as not only an investment in environmental sustainability and liveability, but also an investment in economic welfare and poverty alleviation, especially in situations where unemployment is high.

Introduction

In many towns and cities across the developing world the provision and maintenance of urban green infrastructure is not a priority (Xu et al., 2011; Gwedla and Shackleton, 2015; Anguluri and Narayanan, 2017; Lindley et al., 2018). This is because of the pressing needs posed for a range of grey infrastructure development and services resulting from rapid rates of urbanisation and inadequate budgets. Yet there is increasing evidence that sufficient and quality urban green infrastructure (UGI) can contribute meaningfully to the mitigation and alleviation of some of the sustainability challenges facing urban planners and authorities (Jennings et al., 2016; Zhou et al., 2017). Thus, there is increasing advocacy for sufficient areas and equitable distribution of UGI and the ecosystem benefits it provides.

Several cost-benefit studies have revealed that the benefits of urban trees as part of UGI invariably outweigh the costs by 2–5 times (Roy et al., 2012; Song et al., 2018). However, many of these benefits do not result in direct incomes to the city coffers, whilst the costs are real monetary costs. Real budgets are required to pay for employees, vehicles, equipment, and running costs to establish and maintain public UGI. These costs are generally perceived as a negative. However, in contexts where unemployment is high, expenditure on employment could be considered as a public social benefit. In which case it may be interpreted as a public investment rather than a cost; an investment that yields both environmental benefits simultaneously with employment creation or poverty alleviation (Aronson et al., 2017; Scully-Russ, 2018). Indeed, there is growing acknowledgement that protecting the environment generates employment, within the widespread employment-generating opportunities from sustainable development (Forstater, 2006; Pinderhughes, 2007; Schäffler and Swilling, 2013; Bowen et al., 2018).

Pinderhughes (2007) uses the term green collar (GC) jobs to refer to largely manual labour employment in businesses whose products and services directly improve environmental quality. According to Pinderhughes (2007), there are 22 different sectors of the United States economy that provide GC jobs, ranging from green building construction to renewable energy installation. Green collar jobs in the Global North mostly relate to renewable energy, resource efficiency, recycling, and green building, whereas those in the Global South are currently dominated more by biodiversity management, ecotourism and ecosystem restoration (Scully-Russ, 2018). Green collar jobs are generally regarded to be those that contribute to reducing negative environmental impacts, leading to social, economic and environmental benefits (Forstater, 2006; Bowen and Kuralbayeva, 2015). For the purpose of this study, urban GC jobs are a subsector of the greater green economy, and will be considered as public, private and informal sector jobs which are based on designing, providing and maintaining UGI, ranging from growing, monitoring, evaluation, landscaping, maintenance, composting and clearing in formal and informal, public and private green spaces and vegetation. UGI is taken as “the connected network of multifunctional, predominantly unbuilt, space that supports both ecological and social activities and processes” (Kambites and Owen, 2006).

The potential for combining environmental improvement or maintenance with GC employment is particularly evident in many poorer communities and developing countries. Whilst unemployment is a worldwide challenge, it is most prevalent and intense throughout the developing world due to relatively high populations and urbanisation growth rates (Roy et al., 2012; Mansour et al., 2017). For example, in South Africa, over 65 % of the population lives in towns and cities, but one-quarter to one-third live in poverty and with a similar proportion unemployed (Stats, 2013). In common with many other countries, these statistics are more severe in small towns and secondary cities (Cohen, 2006; Rogerson, 2018). Despite the potential of GC employment to contribute to environmental sustainability and functionality (Aronson et al., 2017), the contribution of GC jobs in promoting and maintaining UGI in developing world towns has hardly been considered. Exceptions include Uddin (2006), Pinderhughes (2007), Kazungu and Magigi (2012) and Kazungu et al. (2014), who showed that GC jobs enabled employees to access basic needs, such as food, water, shelter and clothing. Kazungu and Magigi (2012), who examined the importance of nursery jobs in Tanzania, found that such urban GC jobs have significant potential to contribute to economic growth, employment creation, and poverty alleviation. They found that 68% of nurserymen and women in the sample had experienced an improvement in food security and 76 % in health status since being employed in the nursery sector. Half of the respondents also agreed that the nursery income enabled their children to get a better education and access goods and services they previously could not.

In South Africa, much has been written on the benefits of several public works programmes focussed on job creation and green infrastructure (Turpie et al., 2008; Lal et al., 2010; McConnachie et al., 2013). These include the Working for Water (though removal of invasive alien species), Working on Fire (to prevent and fight wild fires), Working for Wetlands (to restore degraded wetlands) and allied programmes. The activities of these programmes have increased stream-flows and water availability, improved land productivity, restored biodiversity, and reduced fire risks all whilst using pro-poor and labour intensive approaches. These programmes have created around 180 000 permanent job opportunities, of which roughly 52 % are held by women. These publically funded programmes target those with low formal skills and work experience to help build skills and alleviate poverty (Mohapi, 2016; Dladla and Mutambara, 2018), which echoes the assertion of Pinderhughes (2007) and Kazungu et al. (2014) that the target population for GC jobs should be men and women with barriers to employment, a lack of education or skills, and those previously disadvantaged. Thus, urban GC employment can contribute simultaneously to poverty alleviation and skills enhancement whilst enhancing environmental quality and ecosystem services provision (Mincey et al., 2013). Therefore, investing in, restoring, and maintaining UGI is not only ecologically and socially desirable, but also potentially economically advantageous to particular sectors (Uddin, 2006; Elmqvist et al., 2015). Despite this potential, Bowen and Kuralbayeva (2015) lament that there is a lack of studies and data on GC jobs and the associated benefits to GC workers. Allied to this, Forstater (2006) advocates the need to understand and monitor GC jobs to identify ways to improve and enhance their functionality and effectiveness. Within this context, this paper presents a study to determine the number, nature and wage levels of GC jobs associated with the care and maintenance of UGI in a sample of towns in the Eastern Cape province, South Africa.