Energy Justice POINTs: Policies to Create a More Sustainable & Fairer Future for All

Abstract

The transition to clean energy is one of the UK’s five priority areas for COP26. Alongside the potential benefits from creating green energy jobs, transition to a net-zero energy system offers the potential for delivering broader social, political, and economic benefits (Hamilton and Akbar, 2010; Hepburn et al., 2020; Roy et al., 2018; Sovacool et al., 2020). History shows us that socio-economic disruptions associated with transitions tend to amplify inequalities (Sovacool and Brisbois, 2019). It is likely that without intervention, these benefits, and the costs to deliver them, will not be evenly distributed across society, with negative impacts disproportionately affecting those in lower socio-economic and minority groups. Against this backdrop there has been increasing recognition for the need for Energy Justice – to deliver a socially inclusive and equitable net-zero transition (Abram et al., 2020). This growing awareness of the importance of energy justice has created the need for a framework or lens through which policy impact can be explored at the wider system level to help mitigate against unintended consequences. Energy Justice POINTs (Policy Overview and Impacts for Net-zero Transitions) provides a useful and usable framework to help decision makers explore the wide-reaching energy justice implications of their net-zero visions, strategies, and policies. It is based on four tenets of justice: * Distributional – where injustices lie * Recognition – who is affected * Procedural – how injustices can be overcome * Restorative – what we can do to ameliorate past injustices and mitigate against future injustices It also includes an additional four dimensions to take a whole-systems approach to a just transition which has been developed through a review of the literature. In this paper we outline the development of the Energy Justice POINTs framework, discuss how it can be used, and provide a worked example of how the framework could be applied to a specific project.