The Just Transition: Shaping the delivery of the Inevitable Policy Response

At the heart of the 2015 Paris Agreement and Sustainable Development Goals is a theory of change which sees the delivery of critical environmental targets (such as the net-zero economy) as intrinsically connected with wider social objectives such as ending poverty, cutting inequality and achieving decent working conditions across the world. The result needs to be a ‘just transition,’ one that recognises the fundamental injustices of the current fossil-fuel based energy system, the ways in which climate change exacerbates many inequalities (notably in the developing world) and the opportunity of shaping the drive to net-zero so that it helps to overcome these structural failings. This report updates a 2019 IPR report on the just transition in light of growing policy and market action (notably around COP26), as well as the crisis sparked by the war in Ukraine.