Short Abstract:

Social protection has a great potential to contribute to climate change mitigation and adaptation, but the evidence is still limited and, above all, it is not yet clear how to translate it in practice. This panel will explore these issues to better foster climate action through social protection

Long Abstract:

This panel scrutinizes the role of social protection in climate change adaptation and mitigation.

Such role is critical for many reasons. On the one hand, effects of climate change will have severe consequences for poor households who have less capabilities to adapt, anticipate or cope with the effects of climate change. This was the core of the Adaptive Social Protection (ASP) framework. On the other hand, the need to account for distributional effects in mitigation policies for climate change has become increasingly evident in recent years. In fact, research showed that distributional fairness is the main determinant of climate policy acceptability for citizens, making social protection mechanisms an ideal channel to ensure fairness in climate mitigation policies. For example, the redistribution of revenues from environmental taxes or labour market policies can ease transitions towards green jobs.

While the potential role of social protection for climate change is clear, the more insights on the implementation in practice is needed; more and better evidence can enlighten how to design social protection policies that promote effective climate action and avoid maladaptation. Moreover, the role of social protection in climate change needs to better address political economy issues.

The panel is open to contributions from different disciplines and different methodologies. In addition, the panel will look at both case studies of how social protection policies have been implemented (implicitly or explicitly) to foster climate change adaptation or mitigation, but also at cross-country analyses and review papers.

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