Introduction

Climate change is one of the major challenges facing humanity in the twenty-first century. Impacts and risks will grow over time and call for a double response: adaptation to new, often more severe climatic conditions; and a major transition to a low-carbon economy. Awareness of the potentially huge implications of climate change has grown in recent years, but attention from policy makers is still surprisingly limited outside the realm of environment and energy policy. This lack of attention is evident not least within the social policy community.

It is often observed that climate change tends to hit hardest those who are poor and vulnerable. Poor people suffer more than rich people and poor countries suffer more than rich countries. Policy measures to halt climate change can also put disproportionate burdens on the less affluent. These social dimensions of climate change need to be addressed not only in view of future social and economic problems but also because social policy has the potential to affect the ways in which individual countries and the global community respond to climate change.

In this chapter, I focus on social policy and climate policy in the EU. Special attention is given to two social policy areas with important implications for climate policy: income inequality and employment. EU member states have long since had well-established social policy regimes and the EU has also pioneered more extensive climate change mitigation policies. Taken together this makes the EU experience potentially instructive for other regions as well.

I argue that the future success of EU climate change mitigation policies will be dependent on successful social policy design. Social investment policies in particular can provide important backing. I also contend that successful climate policies have important features in common with social investment policies. Both policy areas build on a similar orientation towards investment in the future. Both policy areas also share a preoccupation for the quality of life and a tense relationship to the neoliberal economics paradigm.

European policy makers typically describe social and environmental targets as ‘mutually supportive’. Climate policy and social policy are supposed to develop in tandem within a broader context of sustainable development.