Accessible Climate-Conscious Essential Services

2026-07-22

The European Pillar of Social Rights, in its principle 20, put a renewed emphasis on the fact that the quality and cost of essential services have a tremendous impact on the overall prosperity and inequality levels. Accordingly, a core interest of SGI Europe members, regarding the measure on the health of the European economy and society, remains the development of detailed indicators regarding the evolution towards improving access to quality essential services. This process must rely on detailed, trustworthy, and accessible data and indicators regarding the access to essential services. The implementation of the EU climate action will have to integrate this dimension at its core to foster its acceptability for all EU citizens. In a context where vulnerability might increase due to rising energy prices and their direct effect on cost-of-living issues, or due to the need of more investment to comply with new environment-oriented standards, one understands the interest of being able to measure the level of access to energy throughout the EU. A key question which will be addressed in the project is how best to protect the most vulnerable households particularly affected by the present surge of the energy prices. Through the themes covered, the project will address challenges and priorities set in the European Commission Political Guidelines for 2019-2024, the European Pillar of Social Rights and its Action Plan, and the European Commission proposal for a Council Recommendation on ensuring a fair transition towards climate neutrality. In the context of the project, a specific focus will be put on the following sectors: water, energy, housing and transport. The project will strengthen SGI Europe members capacity to engage in social dialogue in the context of sustainability, social and environmental changes.

Belgium

2025-10-01