The Workforce Challenge
Local government is being asked to do more than ever in response to climate change. Councils are managing growing disaster risks, planning more resilient places, upgrading infrastructure, supporting community wellbeing and responding to rising expectations from governments, funders and communities. But they are doing this in the middle of a workforce crunch. Australia’s local government sector employs around 214,000 people, and ALGA has reported that nine in ten councils are facing jobs and skills shortages that are affecting service delivery.
This matters because the climate challenge is not sitting neatly within one team anymore. It now reaches across planning, assets, engineering, environment, community services, emergency management, procurement and leadership. At the same time, skills shortages remain elevated nationally, with Jobs and Skills Australia reporting that 29% of occupations assessed in the 2025 Occupation Shortage List were in national shortage. Shortages in professional and technical fields remain especially important for councils because these roles sit at the heart of growth, adaptation, infrastructure and place-based decision making.
Leadership and Capability
One of the most important parts of this capability challenge sits with leadership. Councils need leaders who can work adaptively in uncertain conditions, think in systems, connect risks and opportunities across departments, and collaborate effectively with communities, other governments and delivery partners. Climate change is not just a technical issue. It is a governance, strategy and change leadership issue.
Without confident leaders who can guide cross-functional thinking and make sense of complexity, climate action can remain fragmented, reactive and overly dependent on a handful of specialists.
From Labour Shortage to Capability Gap
What is emerging is not just a labour shortage, but a capability gap. Councils increasingly need people who can understand climate risk, think in systems, work across organisational silos and design practical responses that balance financial, environmental and community outcomes.
They also need skills that are becoming more important in a low-carbon, resource-constrained future, including circular-economy design and the ability to apply climate risk in programs, projects, policy and operations. This shift aligns with broader national policy settings, including Australia’s Circular Economy Framework, which aims to double the circularity of the economy by 2035.
Why Upskilling Matters
For many councils, especially in regional and remote areas, the answer cannot simply be to recruit their way out of the problem. The talent pool is too tight, budgets are constrained and the scale of change is too broad.
Upskilling matters because it helps councils build confidence and capability across the workforce they already have. It creates shared language, strengthens decision making and reduces the risk that climate action remains isolated in one specialist role. In a context where councils experienced 529 natural disasters in 2024/25 alone, building internal capability is becoming part of core organisational resilience.
Building the Workforce of the Future
The councils that will be best placed for the future are not necessarily those with the biggest teams. They will be the ones that invest early in climate literacy, practical capability building and workforce pathways that reflect the realities of a changing world.
Building the local government workforce of the future is not a nice-to-have. It is one of the foundations of climate-ready communities.