Across Australia, councils are stepping into a bigger climate role than ever before. They’re planning for hotter summers, protecting natural assets, supporting communities through disasters, and making long-term decisions that shape resilience.
Yet they’re doing this with the same constraints they’ve lived with for years: tight budgets, hard-to-fill roles, and limited access to training. The 2025 Local Government Workforce Insights Report makes this clearer than ever and it reinforces exactly why Climate Jobs exists.
What the report tells us
Put simply, the expectations on councils are growing faster than their current workforce capacity. Some of the strongest signals from the report include:
- Climate, environment and resilience responsibilities are expanding across almost every department.
- Skills shortages are worsening in areas that matter deeply for climate action: planning, environmental health, emergency management and technical expertise.
- Regional and remote councils are feeling the pressure most, with fewer options to attract talent or access specialist learning.
- Traditional qualification pathways aren’t keeping pace. Enrolments are down, and the training package has narrowed.
- Financial constraints remain real, forcing councils to make tough choices.
But the key message isn’t that councils are falling behind, it’s that the system wasn’t designed for the scale of change we’re now asking councils to manage.
The opportunity: building climate capability across the whole workforce
If councils are expected to lead on climate, then climate capability has to extend beyond a single role or team. It needs to sit across leadership, planning, operations, community engagement, essentially everywhere decisions are made.
The report reinforces that councils need support to:
- understand where their current capability sits
- identify the gaps that matter most
- access learning that is practical, flexible and easy to apply
- build shared language and expectations across the organisation
- connect workforce planning with climate ambition
This is the gap Climate Jobs is designed to fill.
How Climate Jobs is stepping into this space
We’re shaping a practical, accessible and future-focused approach that reflects how councils really work. Over the next 12–18 months, we’re focusing on:
- Releasing the Climate Capability Framework — a clear, structured way to understand the skills, knowledge and behaviours a climate-ready workforce needs.
- Launching a self-assessment tool so councils can quickly see how climate and sustainability are embedded across leadership, workforce systems and governance processes within your organisation.
- Offering a simple set of services that give councils clarity: a Snapshot Review, a deeper Capability Review, and workforce pathway.
- Building an ecosystem of partners so councils can access high-quality learning from trusted providers.
- Working with early pilot councils to refine the model and make sure it delivers meaningful value.
A practical way forward
The message from the report is clear: climate capability is now part of core business for councils. It touches governance, leadership, assets, operations, workforce and community engagement.
Climate Jobs is here to support councils to build that capability in a way that is practical, designed for councils all of shapes and sizes and genuinely useful for teams on the ground.
If your council is starting this journey or wants a clearer picture of where it stands, we are happy to help you take the next step. Take our quick self-assessment or chat to us to today about how we can help.