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#EuropeForPatients – our campaign to the 2019 European elections

By Emily Bowles, EPF

EPF is campaigning to put what matters to patients at the heart of EU health policy, and make health an issue that gets citizens to cast their votes and make a difference in the European elections to be held this year in May.

In this important pre-election period hopefully leading to positive change for patients and in health policy in the European Union post-2020, as part of its EU elections campaign EPF is calling for intersectoral action for health, and a fundamental change in Europe’s approach to healthcare access, to achieve universal health coverage and significantly improve quality of life and care for patients.

EPF has therefore identified five key ways in which the European elections can lead to positive change in patient communities. All are based on the five priorities detailed in our elections manifesto, which we also used to develop five powerful video testimonials of patients and help ensure their voice is heard.

One of these priorities relates to achieving healthcare access and universal health coverage. EPF believes this is fundamental to the achievement of the other health and wellbeing-related targets, such as reducing premature mortality, as well as the attainment of all other sustainable development goals and targets related to reduced inequalities, gender equality and elimination of poverty. Health can thus be regarded as a cross-cutting dimension of the UN SDGs.

The EU elections are approaching fast: please get involved, make an impact and ensure the patients’ voice is heard by policy-makers. If you belong to the 70% of Europeans who want the EU to do more for health (Eurobarometer survey, March 2017), join us now in spreading our manifesto, using the #europeforpatients hashtag, sharing and posting your support messages on social media as well as on our website www.europeforpatients.eu. Thank you!

If you wish to support our campaign, share any updates related to the elections, or other health-related priorities feel free to get in touch with us! Several patients with chronic conditions already took the time to share their stories with us. If you are a patient and have a story to tell, they are always welcome.

ALDA funds 10 most innovative actions to raise awareness

By ALDA

The upcoming European Parliament elections taking place in May 2019 are crucial for the future of the European project –for our future.

All over Europe, 18-year old citizens will be called to vote for the European Parliament. For thousands of people, it will be the first opportunity to exercise their right to vote.

We need you, to reach out to young voters and make it clear what is at stake in these elections. How can you make sure fellow young people know what they are called to vote for, how to vote, and the consequences of their actions?

ALDA is offering 10 grants of  €300 each to young Europeans up to 21 years old, for the implementation of initiatives (street actions, online campaigns, etc.) to raise awareness of youth about the upcoming European elections, which can take place between February and April 2019.

Do you have a great idea on how to encourage fellow young Europeans to vote? Are you a European citizen up to 21 years old?

Send the concept of your initiative in .pdf (max 2 pages) to irene.zanetti@aldaintranet.org by 15 February 2019, clearly explaining:

  • how many people you will reach, and how
  • costs foreseen to implement the action (you will need to send us the invoices of costs incurred).

We will select 10 initiatives all over the EU, considering their creativity and potential of reaching a wide number of young Europeans.

On our side, ALDA is active on multiple fronts: we not only call for external actions but we are doing our best to provide and spread European facts as objective as possible.

Thanks to the Europe for Citizens programme, ALDA has been able to launch the “YOU4EU – Towards European Elections 2019” campaign. We are actively engaged in the implementation of social media campaigns in contrast to the rampant fake news and we are committed to spreading correct information about crucial aspects of the functioning of the Union such as the budget and the composition of the different Institutions. To do so, we produced different sets of infographics, each one dealing with a specific misconception, thus trying overcome stereotypes. Our aim is to realise a simple but effective anti-rhetoric to prevent radicalisation and finally leading European citizens to the polls.

We count on you to get all Europeans to have their say, for a stronger Europe! More information here.

ALDA – The European Association for Local Democracy, is dedicated to the promotion of good governance and citizen participation at the local level. ALDA focuses on activities facilitating cooperation between local authorities and civil society.

Vote Volunteering Vision Campaign

By CEV, the European Volunteer Centre

CEV  launches the Vote Volunteer Vision campaign in preparation of the 2019 European Parliament Elections building from the previous campaign we implemented in 2014. The campaign aims to:

  •      Support voluntary sector organisations in their advocacy work at national level by providing tools to be used in the interaction with the 2014 EP election candidates.
  •      Raise awareness about the role of the members of the European Parliament in strengthening the volunteer infrastructure in Europe.
  •      Draw attention to the need for an Intergroup on Volunteering in the European Parliament.
  •      Reveal future possible co-operations between MEPs and other volunteering stakeholders.
  •      Encourage citizens to vote and make decisions on their choice of candidates on the basis of EU issues that matter to them.

CEV has prepared a toolkit that will help volunteer centres and volunteer-involving organisations ask the EP candidates “What is your volunteer vision?”.  Candidates are invited to express their views on different volunteering policy areas. The candidates are also asked to sign a pledge to support the creation of an EP Intergroup on volunteering. Toolkit and pledge can be downloaded at this link https://www.europeanvolunteercentre.org/volunteer-vision.

CEV encourages all volunteering stakeholders to make use of the toolkit that can be personalised to include logos and contact details. Communicate with EP candidates to make sure the 5Rs agenda on volunteering in Europe is supported by elected MEPs!The European Volunteer Centre (CEV) is the European network of over 60 organisations dedicated to the promotion of, and support to, volunteers and volunteering in Europe at European, national or regional level. Through our network we work together to promote and support volunteering through advocacy, knowledge sharing and capacity building & training. In this way we reach out to the many thousands of volunteers and volunteer organisations in Europe as a source of support bringing the European dimension to their work.

The SDGtoolkit

By EEB

The SDGtoolkit brings together more than 300 tools ready for use including articles, presentations, social media activities, images, policy papers, monitoring and review tools, SDG coalitions and more. All the material can be researched for instance by country or SDG. The toolkit answers basic questions on the SDGs with the aim of inspiring national and local level organisations and getting them started. This toolkit aims to help NGOs in Europe to learn more about and work with the opportunities that the Sustainable Development Goals offer to the environmental movement.

These are some the latests uploads that you can check out in the toolkit:
• Germany: The 2018 Peer Review on the German Sustainability Strategy
• Germany: 2018 German shadow report: So_geht_Nachhaltigkei
• UK: Measuring up: How the UK is performing on the UN Sustainable Development Goals
• Engaging parliaments on the 2030 Agenda and the SDGs: representation, accountability and implementation
• Belgium: SDGs in Your Municipality
• The SDG communicator
• The UPR-SDG Data Explorer
• The Human Rights Guide to the Sustainable Development Goals: Linking human rights with all Sustainable Development Goals and targets
• Voluntary National Review Reports– what do they report?

2018 VNR reports:
• Greece: Full report + main messages
• Hungary: Full report + main messages
• Latvia: Full report + main messages
• Lithuania: Full report + main messages
• Ireland: Full report + main messages + CSOs position document
• Spain: Full report + main messages + annexes + CSOs position document

If you want to share a tool related to SDGs on our toolkit, please contact sonia.goicoechea@eeb.org.

The EEB is Europe’s largest network of environmental citizens’ organisations. We bring together around 150 civil society organisations from more than 30 European countries. We stand for sustainable development, environmental justice & participatory democracy.

Reclaiming EU research and innovation as a public good

By Jill McArdle, Global Health Advocates

EU-funded research and innovation has enormous potential to deliver a sustainable and equitable future, yet we have fundamentally distorted its purpose, prioritising innovation for commercialisation over innovation for society’s needs, writes Jill McArdle.

What is research and innovation for? Most would respond that it is for pursuing scientific excellence, the discovery of new knowledge and understanding, for seeking solutions to the most fundamental issues we face and helping us deliver on our international commitments like the Sustainable Development Goals and the Paris Climate Agreement.

Yet, at EU level, the major societal benefits are normally understood as competitiveness of our industries, creating jobs and economic growth. Indeed, the current EU R&I programme sits under the Competitiveness heading in the EU’s seven-year budget and is discussed by member states in the Competitiveness Council.

Other goals, such as sustainable development and excellence, are not absent, but they are mostly treated as tools in pursuit of this ultimate goal.

As civil society believing in the European project, we wonder whether today, this is the right orientation for R&I? We are told of course that we can pursue all these goals at once, but dig deeper and this response seems weak.

Civil society raised alarm bells when the Commission first announced its proposal to merge two of its three pillars: societal challenges with industrial competitiveness in the next hundred billion euro programme Horizon Europe (scheduled to begin in 2021). What was in dispute was not the presence of industry, but the blurring of competitiveness-oriented objectives with those aimed at addressing societal challenges.

This muddling of objectives raises serious questions of governance, transparency and accountability: Who sets the priorities? How can we be sure that sustainable development will not be subordinated to the goal of industrial competitiveness if they conflict?

This week the European Parliament adopted its position on Horizon Europe. While critical improvements were made in terms of climate action, disappointingly, the Parliament declined to put in place other concrete safeguards for sustainable development. There is no guarantee of funding for independent projects that will prioritise societal impact over competitiveness.

This means no assurance that publicly funded R&I can pursue all possible solutions to societal challenges, not merely those that spell profitability for companies. In agriculture, for example, will the programme fund new, relatively safer pesticides to be sold by agribusiness, or alternative pest management techniques that can be implemented by farmers for free?

Looking at governance too, the picture is not reassuring. Strong involvement of citizens and NGOs in setting research priorities can help ensure that sustainable development is not sidelined.

While the Parliament did acknowledge the importance of engaging with society, overall there was a failure to tackle the barriers faced by citizens and civil society organisations, such as lack of capacity and unfamiliarity with the programme. The Parliament, taking their lead from the European Commission, did not support the reintroduction of a dedicated programme for science and society which could have addressed these barriers.

At a concrete level, the Parliament also declined to promote access to the results of R&I. Take health, where the accessibility and affordability of new medicines are crucial to ensuring meaningful impact for society.

Yet proposed new measures, whereby beneficiaries of EU funding would be asked to consider how future medicines could be made accessible, were rejected. Is this surprising, given that health, like the rest of the societal challenges, will sit under the new “Global Challenges and Industrial Competitiveness” pillar?

Most disturbingly, the Parliament undermined Open Access commitments. Access to research results and research data should be a cornerstone of all publicly funded R&I, yet the Parliament chose to extend the list of reasons for “opting out” of open access, covering vague concerns from competitiveness to “security concerns” and “trade secrets”. The list is so broad it could easily be abused to avoid open access obligations.

The inclusion of the “innovation principle” in Horizon Europe is another stark example of how this orientation toward competitiveness and commercialisation is undermining sustainable development. This so-called principle is a tool invented by industry lobbies to undermine EU social and environmental regulations.

It seeks to assess regulations for their “impact on innovation”, rather than assessing innovation for its impact on our health and environment. Its supporters will tell you that this is essential for sustainable development. Yet this misunderstands something: we must always ask what impact innovation has on sustainable development, not the other way around.

We must make clear that R&I serves society and sustainable development first. In prioritising the public interest in this way, R&I will still bring new products and services that will benefit society and the companies who develop them.

Crucially though, it will also leave room for solutions that are not commercialisable, and for ambitious investment in neglected societal challenges where there is little market interest, while also ensuring these solutions are safe, suitable, accessible and affordable.

As we head into negotiations on Horizon Europe, we must urgently change how we view research and innovation: not through a narrow prism serving private interests, but as a public good capable of delivering widely shared societal benefit.

Global Health Advocates is a non-governmental organisation that focuses on engaging all sections of society to fight diseases that disproportionately affect people living in poverty, and are also the leading causes of people living in poverty. In particular, Global Health Advocates works towards the formulation and implementation of effective public policies to fight disease and ill health.  Established in 2001 as the Massive Effort Campaign, Global Health Advocates works in France and in India.

Newsletter from the SDG Watch Europe network –  JAN 2019

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Latvian case study on SDGs and VNR

By Inese Vaivare, LAPAS

The Latvian Platform for Development Cooperation (LAPAS) has been working on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) since 2014, when the stakeholder involvement in the post-2015 process took place. In 2014, LAPAS established the working group on the SDGs within the platform uniting active NGOs, UNESCO NC, and academia. This group aims to coordinate current projects and to mainstream the SDGs in the relevant activities.

Since then, many awareness raising activities have been implemented to mainstream the SDGs – such as tax justice, fast fashion, food security and many more. These include the annual Global Education Week where thematic movies are screened, and the newspaper “The World Becomes Better Place” distributed and relevant workshops organised in cooperation with more than 60 regional partners – schools, youth centres, libraries and others. Special attention has been paid to the training of youth and private companies.

To glocalize the global issues locally, LAPAS has gathered 34 people stories (on each goal) on how the SDGs are being implemented in the work of CSOs, local governments, research institutions and small enterprises. This approach was multiplied at the Baltic level and with the support of the NCM all three Baltic countries gathered best practice cases – 17 for each country.

In 2018, Latvia presented its Voluntary National Review (VNR) at the HLPF and with the support of Forus LAPAS, which prepared a CSO Spotlight Report on the Implementation of the SDGs in the national level in Latvia, participated in the HLPF, including a side event by giving a presentation together with the Minister of Economics.

The experience was written up in in a publication “Voluntary National Review: Connector. Case of Latvian CSOs” – pre-VNR process, VNR and post-VNR.

Since the VNR process, LAPAS continues to work actively with all stakeholders to establish a  multi-stakeholder coalition and the integration of the SDGs in a new National Development Plan.

All materials are available at www.lapas.lv (Global Goals).

The Latvian Platform for Development Cooperation (LAPAS) was established in 2004. The same year, when Latvia joined the European Union. LAPAS unites Latvian NGOs, which believe that Latvia’s transition experience to a democratic market economy can be useful to others. LAPAS also promotes NGO participation in development cooperation and coordinates Latvia’s efforts in development education.

Considerations on linking Urban Agendas and the SDGs

By René Hartinger, Ökosoziales Forum Wien

The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development with it’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals is the most important and most widely known agenda for a sustainable transformation of our societies and our global system. Explained in the shortest possible way (that I can think of), it leads a way into a better future of well-being and decent living conditions for everyone, while societal and economic well-being no longer depends on the exploitation of others – be it the people working in the production or supply chain or the marine systems that are overfished. The forests that are cut down and the species extinct for short-term interest, or the tax payers and workers that uphold the common goods while others shift billions to tax morasses. And, of course: the future generations, that will simply not have the same chances, as their forefathers and foremothers who pumped the atmosphere so full of greenhouse gases that the climate finally collapsed. To give this a name, it is, as the Austrian-German Scientist Uli Brand calls the “imperial way of living” – a lifestyle of some, that is based on unsustainable and unethical exploitation, and simply can not be generalised. The main challenge is to overcome the lock-ins of unsustainability.

To overcome these, the SDGs prompt asking the right questions and consider the right criteria to move towards a liveable world for all. The 17 Goals highlight the cornerstones identified on the way towards the 2030 Vision – which is a world in balance. These goals are highly usable on different political levels: first, they remind us of the 17 main aspects that the world community found important to be considered in political decisions, policies, strategies and measures. Second, they are “down to earth” enough to start conversations about the world we want to live in 2030 with the majority of the people, even with those not visiting our panel discussions or sharing our enthusiasm for terms such as “sustainable development”, “eco-social market economy” or “social-ecological transformation”. Nevertheless, and despite the low barriers, the systemic approach behind the SDGs is leading deep and deeper, once you bear them in mind and consider them in your thoughts and actions.

With a focus on urban areas and cities, a few things can be assumed, thinking about the role and responsibility, the potential and starting points of cities in contributing to reach these 17 Goals (and the liveable and sustainable societies and cities they’re aiming for). Over 50% of the world’s population already lives in cities, and in a few decades,  it will be 70% or more- which underlines the weight of what is happening in the centres. (Centres because cities – small ones as well as metropolitan regions – are always of high importance for the rural areas around them). Cities are also often incubators for the cultural, intellectual and spiritual life of a nation, which is important for two reasons: first, culture is what lies underneath our lifestyles, therefore transformation needs to begin there, rooted in our culture and values. Second, many ideas, which could lead the way towards a liveable 2030, are born, incubated, negotiated or tried out in the centres. And last, not least, many sustainable solutions (such as a well-developed public transport system, universal health services and social security programmes, long distance energy, etc) are based on innovation and infrastructure investments that only make sense in cities, because of the financial meaningfulness – which is why you generally find subways, operas and hospitals in centres.

Therefore, one can think about the Agenda 2030 and it’s 17 Goals in an urban context in two different ways. The first way is that the SDGs are a political compass and communications tool, which enables cities (and their mayors, politicians, administrations, etc) to connect with their citizens and different stakeholders in order to discuss the living conditions and surroundings we want in 2030, and to develop proper strategies and measures within these processes. The more we use the Goals in these dialogues, the more well understood and familiar it will be to work with them, which is a huge benefit. It makes political processes more inclusive and integrative, and it is efficient, as you do not always need to then explain terms such as “social-ecological transformation”, “smart city” or the like. The SDGs are bringing these bulky terms down to earth in a low barrier manner – which is very important, because urban agendas and many people simply ARE down to earth. To summarise: this first way therefore suggest to us to focus on the benefits and chances of the SDGs in the political and societal process and dialogue.

The second way to think about the SDGs in an urban context is the “other way round” – not to start with the SDGs as such, but with issues of concrete urban relevance. Housing, traffic, water and energy supply, air quality, social cohesion, education and health system, poverty prevention and reduction – all of these and many more topics are core urban agendas. Therefore, it could be a promising approach to promote the SDGs with urban actors without starting with “Have you heard there is a new set of goals by the United Nations that…”. But, for example, as housing is a big topic and highly relevant for mayors, start with a differently approach – “We know that housing is a big topic in your city that you are working on. You know, there is this new set of goals for a good future for all by the United Nations, which can be very useful in dealing with such complex issues. You can use these set of goals – the “SDGs” – for your city to find the best possible ways to develop your housing policies in the next years by getting in touch with your own citizens as well as other actors worldwide (other cities, scientists, civil society organisations or businesses) to learn more about what it is important and possible, or to promote what you do here within the worldwide SDG-community.” Such conversations could not only lower the barrier, but also enable new potentials, as working with the SDGs always opens the view and allows an organised, well-reflected approach on the complexity of sustainable development issues.

Combining and using these two views and approaches is promising and productive from our point of view, setting free the urban areas’ potential in sustainability transformation (or the inverse, for breaking out of unsustainable lock-ins). With a focus on housing, for example here in Vienna, the SDGs have helped us to understand that with the 100 year old successful “Vienna Model” of social housing, we do not only have a leverage in providing affordable housing, but also in emission reduction and protection of ecological niches in our city, providing spots of local recreation for the people right outside their door, and much more. But the 17 Goals also help us to understand and to communicate that affordable housing is not a solution unless there is no high quality of public services, social stability and healthy and sound natural environment provided too. And, of course, this also implicates our duty to take care of the future– e.g. through broad education and widespread nature and climate protection measures. We, therefore, consider the SDGs and the Agenda 2030 highly relevant with great potential, and we use them willingly and gladly. But they also remind us, that these set of goals and icons are only a new name for what we and our forefathers and foremothers have been working on long before 2015 – a good city to live in for generations to come. This understanding can be leveraging – as it connects our own efforts and history with a promising new approach and common language leading into a liveable and good future for all.

Rene Hartinger, born 1984, was involved in establishing SDG Watch Austria in 2017 and 2018 and is today Secretary General of the Vienna Ecosocial Forum. The core topics of his organisation are food consumption and production, urban agriculture, nature in cities, and a broader approach on sustainable cities and liveability through the lens of the Agenda 2030’s 17 SDGs. www.oekosozial.at/wien

Towards a just transition: reconciling climate action with the fight against inequalities

By Association 4D

Today, the nationally determined contributions under the Paris Agreement are leading us towards a global warming of around 3.2°C. According to a recent UN report, a tripling of efforts may be needed to keep warming to below 2°C, a goal formulated in the Paris Agreement and in the 2030 Global Agenda for Sustainable Development (Agenda 2030). But how can we accelerate the transition to a low-carbon society when a non-negligible section of the population perceives it as a social injustice, which has negative impacts on employment and the purchasing power of households?

The dependence of our development model on energy, especially fossil fuels for travel, undeniably creates losers, who tend to be the poorest and most vulnerable. Inequalities manifest themselves in access to natural resources, particularly energy: for example, the share of the household budget allocated to energy (fuel, heating) is proportionately much greater for low-income households than for wealthy households.

The reduction of inequalities is now at the core of the international and national political agenda. At the international level, issues of justice and equity are central to international standards and agreements on sustainable development. Thus, the Paris Agreement recognises the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capacities, which enables the fine-tuning of the conventional obligations of states, according to the level and needs of their development. At the centre of the 2030 Agenda is a cross-cutting principle that applies to all of its Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs): leave no one behind. It also includes a goal that is specifically dedicated to reducing inequalities (SDG 10), along with related thematic targets and means. The President of France, Emmanuel Macron, has made the reduction of inequalities a key issue for the G7 that will meet in August 2019 in Biarritz. It is also a major cross-cutting priority for NGOs and associations as part of their contribution to the national roadmap for SDG implementation.

The Sustainable Development Goals: the glue binding the social-ecological pact together?

As social unrest intensifies, how can the SDGs contribute to climate action and the reduction of inequalities? SDG implementation can indeed enable the transition to a low-carbon society to be reconciled with social justice, under certain conditions:

  1.      Firstly, the establishment of wealth indicators other than GDP is essential to measure the impact of the transition regarding its effect on human well-being, rather than in terms of the GDP growth that it could create. Today, GDP growth is an indicator that is used as an ultimate goal for societies. However, it is not appropriate to address the many crises of the 21st century, such as climate change, biodiversity erosion, poverty and growing inequality, the decline of social cohesion, and the democracy crisis. In fact, GDP growth exacerbates – if not, causes – these crises, since exponential material growth is impossible to maintain sustainably in a finite world. In France, the 2015 adoption of the Eva Sas Law, which aims to take into account ten new wealth indicators[1] in the definition of public policies, is an important, but insufficient, step. Since 2015, the French government’s publication of the annual report on these new indicators has been disconnected from national legislative processes, particularly from the budget preparation process. Thus, the purpose of these indicators is today more political (even symbolic) than it is instrumental (budget preparation, evaluation of public policies, etc.). Although the 2030 Agenda, a compromise derived from two years of intense negotiations between developing countries, developed countries and civil society, does not undermine GDP growth as a social project,[2] this new global framework of public action offers all actors, state and non-state, the opportunity to use social-ecological indicators to monitor the implementation of this agenda at national and local levels. For example, civil society actors can already assess their projects using these indicators to identify their positive or negative externalities, or conduct counter-evaluations of local or national public policies.
  2.      Secondly, it is important to accelerate ownership and acculturation of the SDGs by all actors, state and non-state, by developing impact assessments. States, communities, NGOs, and companies can no longer develop public policies, action strategies or projects without considering and taking into account their impacts on sectors that are outside of their usual sphere. This entails developing tools to characterise and assess these impacts: for example, regarding the energy transition, an ex-ante assessment of the draft laws proposed by government or parliament, or strategies and projects developed by non-state actors, should be systematically carried out to improve their coherence with social objectives relating to the fight against social and territorial inequalities. In France, Senator Franck Montaugé’s bill is a step in the right direction. Its purpose is to establish a Parliamentary Council for the evaluation of public policies and well-being, whose mission would be to “inform Parliament on the consequences of public policies on the well-being of populations and sustainability”, on the basis of an assessment carried out from the ten new wealth indicators of the Eva Sas Law. This bill, which was referred back to committee in March 2018, could be enriched with the integration of the SDG’s 98 monitoring indicators, proposed by France’s National Council for Statistical Information (CNIS) in June 2018. A second option would be to seize the opportunity presented by the “large-scale consultation on the ecological transition” organised in January 2019 by the French government to carry out this assessment to stimulate debate.
  3.      There is also a need to strengthen the role of citizens and the individual dimension in SDG implementation. Fostering individual change requires an improvement of its social acceptability, and therefore to consider the diversity of socio-economic situations and inequalities that can be created or reinforced by measures to accelerate the transition to a low-carbon society. It is therefore necessary initially to clarify this diversity of situations and, based on typical profiles determined according to different socio-demographic criteria,[3] to anticipate the inequalities that could be faced by citizens who would engage in the transition. Based on these typical profiles, individual transition prospective scenarios should be developed to enable everyone to plan for a successful life in 2030, and to evaluate their own potential for action. Association 4D, through its Our Life 21 tool, which describes individual prospective stories developed on the basis of internationally agreed targets and scientific scenarios,[4] is a pioneer in this area. The comparison of the prospective stories of the energy transition undertaken by 16 typical families shows that there is a transitory risk of aggravating inequalities among individuals in terms of energy consumption and GHG emissions by 2030,[5] which in turn could widen socio-economic inequalities in the event of an increase in energy prices due to the introduction of a carbon tax. By developing this tool in the framework of SDG implementation, Association 4D aims to highlight the diversity of individual transition trajectories, identifying the capacity for action of each one, and also the obstacles to individual change (socio-economic and territorial inequalities), and the public policies needed to catalyse citizen transition towards sustainable development.
  4.      Finally, it is necessary to support the transition of the most vulnerable by establishing compensation instruments within climate change public policies. The social acceptability of the energy transition, and in particular the ecological taxation around which the social unrest in France has crystallised today, faces two main pitfalls. Firstly, most of the revenue from this tax is allocated to the general state budget, although research has shown that acceptability increases if ecological tax revenues are dedicated to the transition (Hourcade and Combet 2017, Sénit 2012). In 2018, for example, only 560 million euros out of the 4 billion euros of revenue generated by the carbon tax were allocated to the energy check, a compensation mechanism designed to help the poorest households. While the budget allocated to the energy check should reach 740 million euros in 2019, this increase remains too low to both compensate energy inflation (+20% in 2018 for gas, +1.7% for electricity[6]) and help the most vulnerable to sustainably escape from energy poverty. Secondly, the increase in ecological taxation was carried out in a generally unfair fiscal context, marked by a decline in the purchasing power of the poorest following an increase in indirect taxes and decrease of family benefits, a major tax giveaway to the wealthiest (elimination of the wealth tax, decrease in corporate tax), who are sometimes also the most polluting, and the exemption of some very carbon-intensive sectors (aviation and sea transport, for example).[7] While the government focuses its efforts on the reduction of public spending, it seems unlikely that the resources allocated to the energy transition will be sufficient to improve its social acceptability. For example, the annual renovation of 500,000 homes, an objective that was reaffirmed as part of the new Multiannual Energy Plan (PPE) presented by the government on 27 November, is underfunded. Indeed, the energy transition tax credit, the main tool dedicated to the renovation of private housing, saw its budget halved in the 2019 draft budget law, from 1.6 billion Euros in 2018 to 800 million Euros in 2019. According to I4CE’s 2017 Landscape of Climate Finance, the government should invest an additional 2 billion euros a year to meet the PPE’s energy renovation targets. Another example is the mobility bill, presented on 26 November, which does not challenge the place of the private car in mobility, and leaves aside public transport and the necessary public investments for its development, despite its importance for the reduction of social and territorial inequalities. Here again, the SDGs can be useful: the assessment of the state budget in light of the SDGs would improve the coherence between the means allocated to the various sectoral public policies and the social and environmental values ​​and objectives listed in the 2030 Agenda (solidarity, equality, inclusion through access to basic human rights for all, fight against urban sprawl, etc.).[8]

The current protests of the Yellow Vests do not reflect a rejection of engaging in the energy transition and the fight against climate change, but rather a rejection of injustice. We have provided four avenues that could potentially enable the SDGs to become the glue that holds a future social-ecological pact together.

[1] These include: employment rate, research effort, indebtedness, healthy life expectancy, life satisfaction, income inequality, poor living conditions, early exit from school system, carbon footprint, and land take.

[2] Target 8.1 thus aims to “sustain per capita economic growth in accordance with national circumstances and, in particular, at least 7% per annum GDP growth in the least developed countries”.

[3] For example: family situation (couple with or without children/single with or without children), geographical location (rural/peri-urban/urban; mountain/plains/coast), main transport mode (private car/public transport/soft mobility), type of housing (collective/individual; old/new), income level, socio-economic category.

[4] In particular, scenarios from the IPCC and from the Deep Decarbonisation Pathways Project developed by IDDRI.

[5] See also Chancel & Piketty (2015). Carbon and inequality: from Kyoto to Paris. Paris School of Economics, Working Paper.

[6] INSEE

[7] See for example the OpEd by Lucas Chancel in Libération.

[8] See the IDDRI study on integrating the SDGs into national budget processes.