Our research on social impacts of mitigation tops Climate Policy’s downloads of 2019

Climate Policy, a leading interdisciplinary journal covering the different approaches to policy making on climate change, published on its blog the list of the most downloaded journal articles for 2019. This time, the first place was for the article Social impacts of climate change mitigation policies and their implications for inequality, authored by Sanna Markkanen and Annela Anger-Kraavi as part of the research on socio-economic objectives for reaching the Paris Agreement targets by COP21 RIPPLES. The article reached 5584 downloads (and growing) during last year.
The article (open-access) is a synthesis of the evidence from existing literature on social co-impacts of climate change mitigation policy and their implications for inequality. “Policies or initiatives (especially those that affect populations’ livelihoods or access to resources) must be delivered in an inclusive manner to avoid exacerbating existing inequalities”, highlight Markkanen and Anger-Kraavi. Emphasising the risks of an increase in inequality as a consequence of mitigation actions, the article aims to identify measures to be implemented that could reduce those risks, the issues where discussions remains in a stage of speculative nature, and advocates for a conscious effort, careful planning and multi-stakeholder engagement.
The article can be downloaded here.