Advancing the understanding of challenges, policy options and measures to achieve a JUST EU energy transition

ongoing

AdJUST is a transdisciplinary European consortium whose objective is to achieve a step change in societal understanding of the distributive repercussions of the transition to climate neutrality, and to identify effective and actively-supported policy interventions to accompany climate action so that no-one is left behind. AdJUST combines research approaches from complementary disciplines with a continuous social dialogue, ensuring that the project practices open science, models procedural justice, and builds understanding, trust and capacity among citizens and other stakeholders concerning the transition to climate neutrality. AdJUST engages European public bodies, industry, civil society and researchers—i.e. the quadruple helix—to design and promote a shared vision, inspiring them towards the common goal of achieving climate neutrality. It relies on state-of-the-art economic assessment tools, statistical analysis, and research approaches from other Social Sciences & Humanities disciplines—including political science, business management, public administration, political theory, philosophy and ethics—to generate methodologically-sound research results on the full range of challenges of the just transition. These comprise technical, economic, and social/equity dimensions for firms, workers, households and public bodies, and the potential distributional impacts of the EU Green Deal, NextGenerationEU and Fit for 55. AdJUST produces a set of actionable and context-specific policy recommendations—complementing the Just Transition Fund and the Social Climate Fund—to effectively manage competitiveness and distributional trade-offs associated with the transition across Europe, and in specific countries and sectors. Moving well beyond standard public opinion analysis of preferences for climate action, AdJUST probes the conditions under which households, firms, and unions will actively support these initiatives to transition Europe to carbon neutrality.