Research project Welfare state responses to social risks in times of climate change

Climate change demands a societal transition that ensures environmental sustainability while simultaneously enhancing human well-being. This project aims to advance knowledge on how different European welfare states respond to these challenges and vary in their capacity to address the social risks generated by the current environmental transition. The focus is on “new” social risks associated with climate change, with a key distinction between a) direct risks (arising from immediate threats like droughts or floods) and b) indirect social risks (resulting from policy measures to mitigate climate change, such as the regressive impacts of carbon taxes that disproportionately affect low-income earners).

The project adopts a comparative welfare-state perspective, positing that countries' approaches to these risks are shaped by established institutions, interests, and ideas that have evolved within each nation’s welfare, economic, and environmental systems. The aim is both to map the landscape of responses to social risks related to climate change and to explain this variation by developing new theoretical frameworks for future studies on the interplay between climate change, welfare states, and well-being.