Just transition to a green and digital future for all
The policies driving the green and digital transitions, or twin transitions, are intended to level the field to achieve the European Growth Model and attain the EU Green Deal and the UN’s SDGs. However, these policies have had unintended and unforeseen effects, creating new inequalities and/or aggravating existing ones. Those primarily affected are social groups already at risk and EU’s most vulnerable regions. Public authorities and policy-makers at local, national and European levels therefore need evidence-based understanding of these inequalities and concrete ways to prevent and/ or mitigate these.
The READJUST project aims to suggest policy options for overcoming these (potential) trades-offs between efficiency and equality in twin transitions, in the key sectors of mobility and agri-food. The green and digital policies are intended to level the field for attaining SDGs; however, they may return uneven distribution of access to the transitions and their benefits. READJUST aims to suggest options for overcoming the perceived trade-off between efficiency and equality in policy and to make inclusive growth a reality. Policymakers portray a future that is green and digital for the EU, and they aim to continuously contain the unintended consequences of the green and digital transitions in terms of inequalities. Generating zero negative effects on the climate can be efficiently achievable by twining green and digital transitions. Nonetheless, individually and jointly, the transitions might widen the existing inequality gaps. This project aims to contribute to policies for fair and just twin transitions to mitigate existing inequalities driven by the twin transitions and minimize the transitions’ unintended consequences for equality. In this project, we strive to address the inequalities created or exacerbated by the twin transitions policies in certain domains. Policies of green and digital transitions, which are aimed at the growth of the entire, or its subsections.