The US is creating jobs to tackle the climate emergency: could this approach work around the world?

In 1933, amid the Great Depression that followed the stock market crash of 1929, with youth unemployment at record levels, the government of Franklin D. Roosevelt launched the Civilian Conservation Corps, an arguably paternalistic initiative (by today’s standards) that hired unemployed and unmarried young people between the ages of 18 and 25, paid them a salary of $30 a month (equivalent to about $678 in today’s dollars) of which they had to send $25 to their families, provided them with housing, clothing and food, and put them to do unskilled physical labor for the creation and conservation of national parks and natural spaces.

The program, which also had a version for veterans and another for Native Americans, became, with some three million participants, the most popular of the so-called New Deal, an ambitious set of measures that revolutionized the American economy.

Millions of young people worked on those projects to improve and maintain roads and trails, clear brush, deal with insect plagues and fight fires in America’s national parks and forests. Today, the National Park Service, which resulted in large part from that work, welcomes more than 330 million visitors annually to the nation’s 419 national parks and 154 national forests. It was also…