While the EU climate agenda is ambitious in a global comparison, it lacks strategies for handling the consequences and impacts on citizens’ lives and policies for supporting the climate transition on the individual and household levels.
The research results of the EU 1,5° Lifestyles project show that welfare and climate policies in Europe remain insufficiently linked in both discourse and practice.
Therefore, in the new legislative period, there will be new kinds of challenges for the EU and the Member States. Since effective climate policies tend to have distributional effects, it will be more important to consider distributive effects and social justice in the forthcoming implementation of EU climate policies.
In fact, ensuring that the transition to a sustainable future is fair and inclusive will probably be a larger challenge than setting targets and formulating policies. When climate policies do not sufficiently consider the needs of vulnerable groups, they risk exacerbating existing political polarisation and societal division.
Research shows that policy can be developed to both mitigate emissions and strengthen citizens’ welfare and wellbeing in ways that gain voters’ acceptance. This is one of the clear results of the EU 1,5° Lifestyles project.
In the new European legislation, when implementing Fit for 55, the newly elected European Parliament and the forthcoming cabinet of European Commissioners will have to consider distributive and justice aspects of the climate transition, and the Member States will have to better integrate welfare policies with climate policies. Finally, these policies need to be grounded in solid science-based knowledge, including the results of the EU 1,5° Lifestyles project.
Read the blog post by Marianne Ekdahl here.
