Resilient supply chains

The EU’s recent shift towards geo-economic instruments, and its emphasis on economic security and competitiveness, does not need to entail the sidelining of environmental and social objectives. Building resilient supply chains is just as much a question of responding to calls for equal partnerships, and integrating justice considerations in the EU’s external environmental action as it is about diversifying energy-related partnerships. As such, the creation of a common and coherent understanding of justice, especially in situations of scarce resources, would go a long way in accelerating the wide-scale social, political, and economic transformations that are needed to face climate change.

The scale of the transition requires us to tackle existing global socio-economic inequalities that stand in the way of ambitious climate policies. Social and environmental objectives must therefore become inextricably linked to avoid climate and environmental policies from having further negative distributional impacts and exacerbating tensions in global fora.

As part of this discussion, some of the conclusions from the policy study ‘Evaluating the Impact of CBAM on Developing Countries‘ were presented by its authors, Suranjali Tandon and Kevin Le Merle. Given the severity of the climate crisis and its global ramifications, the EU cannot act alone on the question of climate change, further underlining the importance of justice-based approaches across the EU’s external environmental policies.

This event explored avenues for considering the international, intranational, and intergenerational dimensions of resource use from a global distributive justice perspective. We focused specifically on questions of critical resources used in global supply chains and sought solutions for balancing resilience against the imperatives of global cooperation and the protection of biodiversity.

For more information regarding this event, please do not hesitate to contact Luis Sáez Jiménez, Project Officer, at luis.saez@feps-europe.eu