Some 1.3 million people are employed in carbon-intensive ‘brown’ jobs that will need to adapt to cleaner technologies and processes.

In its report, the Resolution Foundation said that the share of ‘green jobs’ has grown by just 1.3 percentage points over the past decade, but it anticipates that this change will accelerate over the course of this decade as firms replace emissions-intense processes with new, clean technologies and practices.

The sheer pace of change coming has led some to claim that the decarbonisation drive of the 2020s and 2030s will lead to a repeat of the job destruction of deindustrialisation that saw manufacturing shrink as a share of employment by 5 percentage points a decade in the 1970s and 1980s.

But the research shows that the labour market will see changes from decarbonisation rather than a shrinkage in the number of roles. For example, affected employees such as those working as HGV drivers or in energy plants will be driving...