Europe’s Green Deal needs to effectively handle rising distributional effects

Today’s political willingness to achieve more ambi­tious GHG emissions reduction targets by 2030, through legislative tools and financial instruments requires a regulatory breakthrough. We need a regulatory paradigm shift to manage the speed of the decarbonisation efforts and the unintended consequences of an aggressive energy transition for citizens and the economy as a whole.

The European Green Deal is a great opportunity to reframe the conceptual framework, the organisa­tional set-up and the regulatory instruments which are necessary to deal effectively with distributional effects of energy and climate policies in the short and long run.

This open letter and CERRE Energy & Climate Issue Paper gather four challenges and four recommendations for action to support European leaders in taking effective and fair measures to tackle the urgent climate crisis.