This note was prompted by an observation from Satyam Vyas after the G-CETI convening at the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center: “the money is arriving faster than the people.”

Satyam’s note from Bellagio contains a sentence that is easy to pass over: the money may be arriving faster than the people.

That sounds like a workforce problem. I think it is more interesting than that.

A great deal of climate policy is built around shortages of capital, technology and projects. We ask whether enough money is available, whether technologies are mature, whether investors can find bankable opportunities, and whether governments have sufficient pipelines. These are real constraints. But they assume that once capital and technology arrive, institutions will somehow have the people required to use them.

That assumption may be wrong.

A rural solar utility does not operate itself. A battery recycling plant needs managers, technicians, safety systems and supply-chain knowledge. Cities trying to adapt to extreme heat need people who understand public health, urban design, labour systems and data. Governments trying to build resilience need officials who can prepare projects, procure differently, interpret risk and coordinate across agencies. Capital can finance an asset. It cannot instantly create the human capability required to make the asset work.

This may explain a puzzle that appears repeatedly in development. Money is announced, technology exists, pilots succeed, and yet scale remains strangely slow. We usually interpret this as a financing or institutional problem. Sometimes it is. But institutions are ultimately made of people. A ministry can acquire a mandate before it has staff who know how to execute it. A city can approve a resilience plan without having people who can turn it into projects. A fund can commit capital before there are enough enterprises capable of absorbing it.

Satyam’s second observation is therefore important. “Green jobs” may be too narrow a category. The transition will not be delivered only by a new class of climate specialists. Much of it will be carried by electricians, engineers, planners, accountants, health workers, mechanics, procurement officers, financiers and public servants whose existing roles are changing.

This matters because specialist language can lead to specialist responses. If we treat climate talent as a niche profession, we will build fellowships, leadership programmes and specialised degrees. Some of these will be valuable. But a transition occurring across an economy requires something more ordinary and much larger: polytechnics changing curricula, employers retraining workers, public institutions changing job descriptions, professional bodies updating standards and existing occupations acquiring new capabilities.

The counterargument is that labour markets adapt. When demand rises, wages rise, people train and employers invest in skills. That is partly true. But climate transitions are unusual because policy can shift demand quickly while training systems move slowly. It can take years to train technicians, engineers or public officials. The costs of that delay are not merely unfilled jobs. Projects stall, assets underperform and capital waits.

The lack of good workforce data makes the problem harder. If countries cannot say who currently works in clean energy, where they are, what skills they possess and which roles are missing, then talent planning begins with estimates built on other estimates. Satyam’s observation that “nobody is counting” is therefore not just a data complaint. It points to a failure of institutional foresight.

This also changes how I think about resilience. We often describe resilience as infrastructure, finance, policy or community capability. But perhaps human capability is itself infrastructure. It is slow to build, difficult to import at scale and easy to neglect because it does not appear as a physical asset on a balance sheet.

That has implications beyond clean energy. Adaptation, cooling, food systems, early warning, disaster finance and resilient cities may all face the same constraint. The limiting factor may eventually be neither ideas nor money, but whether enough people exist inside the right institutions to turn both into action.

If that is true, then one of the most important questions in climate finance is not simply, “How much capital can we mobilise?”

It is:

Who will know what to do with it when it arrives?.