The European Union (EU) announced its ‘European Green Deal’ (EGD) in late 2019, partly in response to mass protests. The EGD is a broad programme that aims for a just transition to carbon neutrality by 2050, and a range of measures have been adopted in this direction. Discussions about whether the EGD’s aim is in line with climate and broader environmental justice, and whether the policies adopted so far will actually achieve the EGD’s aims, have been underway since its adoption. The proposed paper examines how climate movement actors see the EGD. It first reviews how and whether the EGD and the EU more broadly is framed by climate justice movement actors. It reveals that the EU is by no means a priority target for many movement actors, explaining this against the backdrop of scholarship on the critical Europeanism of movements. The paper then discusses movement groups’ claims and frames of the EGD, and links these to reflections on how these could translate into action impacting the EU’s decision-making. In this line it draws on the literature discussing impactful movement campaigning in the EU and applies this to the EGD. While specific decisions could be impacted via strong links and coordinated action by advocacy and movement groups, impacting the overall direction of the EU and the EGD appears more complex. Existing participatory forums at EU level leave little space for effecting broad change, and bottom-up paths may be more promising or at least an important addition to more formal spaces of participation. The paper will draw on an extensive review of the existing literature and frame analyses of movement group texts.

The European Green Deal (EGD) represents the comprehensive strategy of the European Union (EU) to address climate change. The proposed paper will underline how the predominant technical-economic approach adopted by the EGD strides with the growing conviction that tackling climate change must undertake the justice issue. The justice issue equally concerns the external dimension of the EGD. Since climate change ignores borders, the EGD acknowledges the need for the EU to cooperate with other countries on several fronts, from trade to technological innovation, to ensure a green transition. As the EU unfolded its climate blueprint, several voices from both the Global North and South expressed their concern that the EGD could risk perpetuating colonial patterns of exploitation in the name of green transition. The technical-economic focus without a climate justice approach represents the weak flank of the EGD. Building upon academic literature on green extractivism, sacrifice zones, and climate coloniality, the proposed paper will explore the need for the EGD to prioritise an approach based on climate justice that acknowledges historical responsibilities to end exploitation in the green transition. Moreover, the EGD rhetoric of pioneering green transition risks sideline the established socio-environmental knowledge and practices advocated by communities in the Global South. Ignoring these approaches perpetuates a neocolonial mindset by widening the power balance in EU-South cooperation on transition strategies. The proposed paper will use this framework to analyse EU documents to highlight how their technical-economic rhetoric is not paired with a reflection on climate justice. This analysis will look at the EU Critical Raw Materials (CRM) strategy, vital to delivering the EGD, that risks replicating historical patterns of colonial-era resource extraction against CRM-rich countries in the Global South. This risk led scholars and activists to accuse the EGD push for renewable energy technologies, reliant on CRM such as lithium and cobalt, of placing the environmental and social burden of green transition on the Global South while allowing the EU to reap the benefits. The proposed paper highlights the differences between the prevailing technical-economic discourse endorsed by the EU and the increasing recognition that addressing climate change necessitates a special emphasis on justice. The proposed paper will embrace a non-colonial climate justice perspective to emphasize the urgent need for the EU to develop a socially just framework also in respect to the Global South.

The proposal for a recast Air Quality Directive introduces a right of compensation accruing to individuals who suffer health damages caused by breaches of the obligations laid down in the Directive. This proposal ties into unresolved issues about the type of rights and remedies available to concerned individuals and NGOs in relation to the judicial enforcement of EU environmental provisions at domestic level. This contribution reflects on the difficulty to translate collective environmental interests into subjective rights deserving of judicial protection. On the basis of an analysis of recent judgments, it explains that the Court articulated a procedural right to institute judicial proceedings for the sake of environmental protection that accrues to “directly concerned” individuals and NGOs. It also shows that, as EU law currently stands, individuals cannot derive a subjective right to obtain damages based on infringements of environmental provisions. This contribution subsequently assesses whether the proposal is susceptible to enhance the effective judicial protection of individuals’ right to breathe clean air at national level. It shows that the proposal enables to circumvent the traditional requirement of “conferral of rights” that prevents (most) environmental provisions from giving rise to a right of compensation in favour of individuals affected by a breach of these provisions. At the same time, it points to some unresolved questions relating to the establishment of the causal link between a given breach and specific health damages suffered by individuals.

The European Green Deal presented in 2019 marked the EU’s commitment to tackle climate change with its goal of a climate-neutral continent by 2050. In the shift towards a green economy, the issue of justice and fairness has been a rhetorical cornerstone, with the need for a “just transition” being plainly stated in the presentation of the project. From a foreign policy perspective, the severity and scope of the climate emergency calls for concerted international action. According to Horn and Sapir, for global climate cooperation to be conducive to impactful action “it is equally important that [climate policy] be perceived as fair in terms of the international distribution of costs and benefits that it entails” (Horn, Henrik and Sapir, 2013). Despite the EU’s clear track record in trying to solidarize global climate efforts its performance as a champion of climate justice is ambivalent, and the question remains whether the EU’s domestic just transition will facilitate a global just transition (von Lucke et al., 2021; College of Europe in Natolin, 2021). There is a significant body of literature from political philosophy, moral philosophy, and climate ethics, identifying what we can consider fair in terms of the allocation of the costs and benefits of climate policy (Caney, 2014; Page, 2013). This literature has by and large coalesced around two key principles of climate justice that have also normatively influenced the Common But Differentiated Responsibility principle of the Paris Agreement: the Polluter Pays Principle, and the Ability to Pay Principle (Knight and Le Merle, 2023; Caney, 2014; Shue, 1999). However, there has so far been little to no research coherently assessing the EU’s policy practice against these principles (Le Merle, 2022). This paper intends to fill this gap by proposing a case study: a systematic assessment of the EU's Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism against the two most normatively plausible and widely used principles of climate justice. The central question would be: to what extent does the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism align with the Polluter Pays Principle and the Ability to Pay Principle (hereafter PP and ATP)? In doing this, the focus will be on evaluating whether the global distribution of costs and benefits entailed by CBAM can be considered fair according to these principles. To do this, this paper takes a closer look at three case studies, respectively the impact of an EU-CBAM on China, India, and Mozambique.