An exploration of potential conflicts and synergies between climate change mitigation policies and social justice in Europe. (report to the first phase)

This paper explores the potential conflicts and synergies between climate change mitigation policies and social justice issues in Europe. It identifies EU-level policies and measures likely to play an important role in climate change mitigation over the next three to five years and analyses case studies in selected EU Member States, using a set of indicators to explore their potential implications from a social justice point of view.

This paper explores the potential conflicts and synergies between climate change mitigation policies and social justice issues in Europe. It identifies EU-level policies and measures likely to play an important role in climate change mitigation over the next three to five years and analyses case studies in selected EU Member States, using a set of indicators to explore their potential implications from a social justice point of view. The paper evaluates selected policies at EU and Member State level, including:

• the EU’s Emission Trading System;
• policies to promote the development and use of renewable energies (including feed-in tariffs in Germany and green certificates in the UK);
• measures to boost fuel economy and the use of biofuels in road transport;
• initiatives designed to improve the energy performance of buildings (including energy performance certificates and financial mechanisms such as the Belgian Fonds de Réduction de Coût global de l’Energie);
• the use of energy taxes to encourage investments in energy-saving measures (including the planned French carbon tax); and
• initiatives to encourage moves towards less energy-intensive products (including the EU decision to phase out incandescent light bulbs by 2012).

The authors consider the potential implications of each measure for social justice – analysing, for example, their impact on the prices paid by consumers, how the costs and benefits are shared, whether they are likely to create or destroy jobs, what impact, if any, they could have on health – and highlight areas of concern and issues which require further investigation. Climate change mitigation policy is focused on changing behaviour at all levels of society, from governments through manufacturing industry to households. It may therefore have a wide array of social effects: some relatively direct, others stemming from a series of complex economic adjustments at a global as well as European level. Given the many variables involved over a long timescale, there is a need for monitoring and a programme of active social research to compare their unexpected as well as more predictable impacts. A common feature of many of the measures reviewed in this paper is that they focus on restructuring the electricity supply industry and some energy-intensive technologies, ultimately at the cost of the consumer rather than the state, with companies passing the costs onto their customers. This will tend to be socially regressive unless it is offset by measures to counter fuel poverty, for example by targeting support at vulnerable households or low-income groups.

While efforts are being made in some cases to compensate for any anticipated negative consequences of climate change mitigation measures on particular social groups and increased attention is being paid to the side-benefits of climate change mitigation policies, the paper argues that much greater efforts are needed to identify synergies between policy domains more systematically and creatively. This is a critical challenge for climate policy, requiring some synchronisation between measures developed at the European level and the more fine-grained social interventions initiated and managed at the national or local level. It is also linked to EU Cohesion Policy and the use of Structural Funds to finance energy efficiency improvements in the new Member States. Another issue which merits closer attention and debate is how the “polluter pays principle” is being applied in climate change mitigation policies, amid signs that the costs of some measures are not being shared out in accordance with this principle. A fairer distribution of costs that takes into account the capacity of different sectors of society to absorb those costs is also critical to strengthen the synergies between climate change mitigation and social justice. The paper concludes that despite the increasing array of policy measures in Europe aimed at curbing greenhouse gas emissions, there has been relatively little debate about the consequences for social justice in Europe, and too little attention paid to the potential benefits of a ‘bottom-up’ approach focused on households. Indeed, the authors found few examples of procedures or processes for integrating social dimensions into the climate change debate. Does this suggest that politicians attached relatively little priority to social justice at a European level? Or is it related to the more limited EU competence in this area, in contrast to the EU’s central role in climate policy-making, with Member States playing the primary role in this domain? Could it also be linked to the fact that the debate about the three pillars of sustainable development has been too often phrased in terms of trade-offs and much less in terms of win-win opportunities? Or that the link between the social and environmental pillars of sustainable development has not been extensively explored yet. This paper does not attempt to provide the answers to all these questions. It aims instead to highlight the key issues which require further detailed analysis and debate before developing concrete policy proposals to integrate the climate change mitigation and social justice agendas in Europe.

Schiellerup P., Chiavari J., Bauler T., Grancagnolo M. (2009), An exploration of potential conflicts and synergies climate change mitigation policies and social justice in Europe. Discussion Paper. November 2009. King Baudouin Foundation, Belgium, Brussels.