Just transition

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EDITORIAL

In spite of the potential offered by low-carbon technologies, and although China and the United States, in particular, have invested massively in these technologies, not enough is being done to promote their use in Europe.

Europe must urgently develop a strategy to ensure that innovation in clean technologies takes place within this continent too. Equally urgent is investment in technologies contributing to Europe’s energy security of supply, including through increased energy efficiency and the diversified supply of low-carbon energy.

Achievement of these goals requires government intervention, as well as a portfolio of more efficient public and private instruments.

The instruments to be activated by public authorities – such as support for R&D, support for the demonstration and deployment of technologies, standard-setting, regulation, public investment, spread of technologies to the South, good management of green jobs and skills and, more generally, a management of just social transition in sectors at risk and requiring additional focus on opportunities, education, training and lifelong-learning frameworks, etc; – require that public authorities have sizeable budgets available, at the European, territorial and sectoral levels.

Existing European financial instruments can be used to finance these policies – the EU general budget; the European recovery plan; the structural funds under the European cohesion programme 2007-2013 – but these are currently not enough. While the European Investment Bank and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development also offer interesting prospects, the currently available financial instruments must be reinforced and further mobilised to the benefit of a EU development strategy.

To tackle the challenge of climate change, the European Union needs also to mobilise indirect existing resources. It should reform its system of governance of the funds used to combat climate change by fully incorporating the social aspects into the framework of a sustainable development objective, and by making use of new and innovative sources of financing, such as a tax on financial transactions.

Information and analysis about financial instruments that can be used to tackle climate change were shared during an ETUI-ETUC joint seminar on climate policies organized in Brussels in March 2010. Thanks to this capacity-building session, experts from national organizations are now working more actively on these issues which are part of our ‘just transition’ agenda. This is taking place in a context of firm trade union commitment to move in the direction of a just transition. The trade unions’ determination in this respect is indeed further strengthened by an awareness that the current forms of restructuring stem predominantly from financial considerations that are quite alien to the concern for a forward-looking and properly managed process of transition and which make the debate on a just transition all the more difficult.

Anne Panneels
ETUC Advisor

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Last modified: 4 Aug 2010
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