Conference Agenda

The dual challenges of climate change and the transition to a low-carbon society profoundly affect household well-being, often exacerbating existing socio-economic disparities. Climate impacts such as extreme weather events and policy-driven increases in energy costs expose households to varied vulnerabilities depending on their financial and human capital, housing conditions, geographic location, and other factors. These disparities challenge the equity and political stability of the green transition, necessitating a framework for operationalizing the concept of a "just transition" that is both evidence-based and informed by principles of justice. This paper introduces a quantitative framework for assessing household vulnerability to climate change and the green transition, employing the IPCC’s definition of vulnerability as the interaction of exposure, sensitivity, and adaptive capacity. Building on the Foster-Greer-Thorbecke (FGT) indices originally designed for poverty measurement, the framework evaluates vulnerability along three dimensions: incidence (the proportion of vulnerable households), intensity (the severity of vulnerability), and inequality (the distribution of vulnerability). Using administrative microdata from nearly 7 million Dutch households, we use this framework to map vulnerability across energy, mobility, and environmental domains at an unprecedented level of detail. To demonstrate the framework's utility, we simulate the allocation of a hypothetical government investment of 1 billion euros under different justice principles—egalitarianism, sufficientarianism, and Rawlsian ethics—and analyze the impact on our vulnerability metrics. This simulation underscores the normative implications of policy choices, revealing trade-offs between reducing the number of vulnerable households, mitigating severe vulnerabilities, and addressing inequality among the most vulnerable. By aligning household-level data with ethical principles, this study advances the integration of normative justice principles into data-driven decision-making, to support a transition that leaves no one behind.