World Social Protection Report 2024-26: Universal social protection for climate action and a just transition

Key messages

• Social protection makes an important contribution to both climate change adaptation and mitigation

  Social protection is fundamental for climate change adaptation as it tackles the root causes of vulnerability by preventing poverty and social inclusion and reducing inequality. It enhances people’s capacity to cope with climate-related shocks ex-ante by providing an income floor and access to healthcare. It also contributes to raising adaptive capacities, including those of future generations through its positive impacts on human development, productive investment, and livelihood diversification. Moreover, an inclusive and efficient loss and damage response at scale can leverage social protection systems, particularly when high levels of coverage and preparedness exist. 

  Social protection systems are also key for compensating and cushioning people and enterprises from the potential adverse impacts of mitigation and other environmental policies. When combined with active labour market policies, they can help people transition to greener jobs and more sustainable economic practices. Social protection can also directly support mitigation efforts. The greening of public pension funds, the conversion of fossil fuel subsidies into social protection benefits, and the provision of income support to disincentivize harmful activity to protect and restore crucial natural carbon sinks, are some of the options to support emission reductions.

• Social protection is an enabler of climate action and a catalyst for a just transition and greater social justice

  Social protection systems, as part of an integrated policy response, meet the imperatives of mitigation and adaptation in an equitable manner. Social protection helps to protect people’s incomes, health and jobs, as well as enterprises, from climate shocks and the adverse impacts of climate policies. Social protection encourages productive risk-taking and forward planning and thus can ensure that everyone – including the most vulnerable –  can gain from climate change adaptation measures. 

  It can enable job restructuring, protect living standards, maintain social cohesion, reduce vulnerability, and contribute to building fairer, more inclusive societies, and sustainable and productive economies. However, social protection cannot do this on its own. It needs to work in tandem with other policies to enable effective mitigation and adaptation policies, which are so utterly vital for a liveable planet.

• Decisive policy action is required to strengthen social protection systems and adapt them to new realities

  Social protection increases the resilience of people, economies and societies by providing a systematic policy response to mutually reinforcing life-cycle risks and climate-related risks (which look poised to become increasingly inseparable and indistinct with each decimal point of global warming). In this context, policymakers will have to achieve a double objective: implementing climate policies to support mitigation and adaptation efforts to contain the climate crisis, while at the same time strengthening social protection to address both ordinary life-cycle risks and climate risks. In the context of an evolving risk landscape, policymakers must ensure their social protection systems can deal with both types of risk.

• The capacity of social protection systems to contribute to a just transition is held back by persistent gaps in social protection coverage, adequacy and financing

  These hinder the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals by 2030. Investing in reinforcing social protection systems is indispensable for a successful just transition. The costs of inaction are enormous, and it would be irrational and imprudent not to invest. The case for strengthening social protection systems is therefore as compelling as it is urgent. 

  Without investment in universal protection systems, the climate crisis will exacerbate existing vulnerabilities, poverty and inequalities, when precisely the opposite is needed. Moreover, for ambitious mitigation and environmental policies to be feasible, social protection will be needed to garner public support. Human rights instruments and international social security standards provide essential guidance for building universal social protection systems capable of responding to these challenges and realizing the human right to social security for all.

• Social justice must inform climate action and a just transition, with human rights at the heart of the process

  Social protection can help ensure no one is left behind. It can contribute to rectifying long-standing global and domestic inequalities and inequities rendered more pronounced by the climate crisis. The climate crisis can only be overcome through common effort but with differentiated responsibility proportional to capacity. It needs to be recognized that special remedial responsibility lies with those primarily responsible for the crisis. This has major implications for financing social protection at the domestic level, and for the role of international financial support for countries with insufficient economic and fiscal capacities that have contributed least to the crisis but are bearing its brunt. This constitutes a key element of social justice.