Fostering equity and justice in climate policies – Societal Readiness Pilot

Project results are expected to contribute to all of the following expected outcomes:

• Climate policies are made more inclusive and equitable, facilitating acceptance across political and societal stakeholders with various socio-economic and development status, both within the EU and globally, enabling high ambition climate action and helping to deliver on the European Green Deal’s commitment to “leave no one behind”;
• There is an improved consensus between the Global North and the Global South within the UNFCCC process, unlocking a greater momentum in the implementation of the Paris Agreement;
• The evidence base underpinning IPCC assessments is strengthened, diversified, and made more inclusive, facilitating consensus and government approval processes;
• Social science perspectives on justice and equity are better incorporated into policy narratives, scenarios, and models, improving their societal relevance and ensuring that climate action strategies are more reflective of the needs, values and concerns of diverse societal groups, building trust in results and outcomes, and increasing their uptake potential.

Climate change and the transition to low-carbon, climate-resilient future raises complex justice questions around equitable sharing of benefits and burdens of mitigation and adaptation efforts. These considerations not only animate global climate negotiations, but also increasingly emerge as a central issue for national politics, legal systems and for the society at large. Fairness thus becomes both a critical enabler and a potential barrier for shaping ambitious climate action, underscoring the need for prioritising research on advancing just climate transitions within the EU and globally.

For example, mitigation scenarios that have informed and influenced global climate policymaking and target-setting, and form a vital component of IPCC assessments, have been criticised for not considering fairness more explicitly and systematically, creating a barrier to their acceptance as a basis for global mitigation efforts. On the other hand, to avoid exacerbating existing vulnerabilities and locking into maladaptive pathways, it is also necessary to better account for the justice dimension in adaptation planning and implementation.

Actions should advance more comprehensive and interdisciplinary understanding of climate justice in the context of the European and global mitigation and adaptation policies, promoting awareness, consistency and co-production approaches. They should take into consideration socio-economic, territorial and development disparities that exist between and within countries, regions and across various segments of the population. Actions should address multiple dimensions of justice, diverse spatial and temporal scales (e.g., intergenerational justice), and explore the role of a broad range of social, political, economic, and cultural contexts and factors. These include both collective (such as values, power structures, institutional and legal frameworks, political economy, development models, climate elites) and individual (such as age, gender, and intersectionality) features. Building on the resulting insights, actions are expected to develop recommendations on how to design, implement and evaluate just climate transitions, including definition of specific indicators, standards, and criteria to better operationalise the justice concept in adaptation and mitigation pathways. Among others, actions should address some of the following aspects ^[1]:

• Improve integrated assessment models to better represent justice and equity, differences in regional outcomes, and common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities;
• Enhance clarity, comparability, and transparency across global mitigation scenarios with regard to different justice aspects. Evaluate the feasibility and consistency of regionally differentiated long-term mitigation goals in terms of, for example, investments and financial flows, governance and institutional needs;
• Analyse distributional aspects of climate policies, assess consequences for well-being and living standards of people from different socio-economic and development contexts. Advance research to assess the needs of and the effects on the most vulnerable and disadvantaged population segments (e.g., elderly, children, women, migrants, minorities, households at risk from energy and/or transport poverty) and sectors, and provide recommendations for corrective measures;
• Assess the trade-offs and co-benefits between climate action and inequality reduction. Explore the role of inequality and injustice as constraints to individual and collective climate action;
• Investigate innovative climate policy instruments, initiatives and approaches alternative to those prioritising economic efficiency and propose a broader spectrum of climate policies with more attention to equity. Assess their feasibility;
• Investigate justice in the context of sectorial transitions, with focus on under-researched (from justice perspective) sectors such as agriculture, forestry and land use;
• Advance research on how to better account for the needs and constraints of communities representing diversity of vulnerability profiles in disaster risk reduction and adaptation strategies.

Actions should address justice and equity of climate policies both within the EU and from a global perspective, but they may choose to prioritise one of these dimensions, using the other as framing information.

The research should be conducted through close collaboration between research teams from Europe and low or middle-income countries, hence international cooperation is required (see eligibility conditions). Moreover, involvement of key stakeholders and regional experts as part of an inclusive process is essential to guarantee that all relevant perspectives are adequately represented. The involvement of civil society is also highly recommended.

All projects funded under this topic are strongly encouraged to connect, coordinate, and participate in networking, intercomparison and joint activities, to exploit synergies and maximise complementarities. They should also envisage clustering activities with other relevant projects (in^[2] and outside of Horizon Europe) for cross-projects cooperation and exchange of results. Proposals should earmark the necessary resources for these purposes.

This topic is a Societal-Readiness pilot:

• Proposals should follow the instructions applying to the Societal readiness pilot, as described in the introduction of the Horizon Europe Main Work Programme 2025 for Climate, Energy and Mobility. They entail the use of an interdisciplinary approach to deepening consideration and responsiveness of research and innovation activities to societal needs and concerns.
• This topic requires effective contribution of the relevant SSH expertise, including the involvement of SSH experts in the consortium, to meaningfully support Societal Readiness. Specifically, SSH expertise is expected to enable the design of project objectives with Societal Readiness related activities. Consortia should mobilise a variety of SSH research backgrounds, in particular equity, poverty, and gender experts.

[1] The evaluation will follow the standard Horizon Europe evaluation criteria, regardless of the number of the aspects covered.

[2] For example, relevant projects funded under the calls of Horizon Europe Cluster 5 on Climate sciences and responses and Cluster 2 on Innovative research on social and economic transformations.