Activites

While decent living is necessary – and crucial for the political acceptability of ecological transition strategies, the energy and material cost of needs satisfaction cannot be overlooked in the 21st century. In this context, favouring the harmony between human and natural systems may call for yet untried post-growth strategies. Likewise, the provision of decent living for all supposes that the cost of transition is well distributed and changes are broadly accepted and politically supported. The transition to sustainability is inherently disruptive, necessitating societal acceptance and robust political engagement.

The SEN-HARP model, developed by SPES Researchers from the University of Bordeaux,  is specifically designed to address these challenges by investigating the potential for a reinforced Green Deal in the EU27.

Objectives

Researchers from the University of Bordeaux developed a biophysical Agent-Based Stock-Flow Consistent Model, the Society-Economy-nature (SEN-HARP) model,  of the safe and just transition that allows addressing various current hot topics for both research and policy.

The model is useful to assess the extent to which democracy and political alternation changes transition trajectories. This is an important question as democracy is sometimes presented as a hindrance for acting against climate change under the pressure of contradictory interests and political influence.

Secondly, the SEN-HARP model goes beyond the traditional outcomes used for evaluating the effectiveness, fairness and responsiveness of transition policies: employment, income and consumption. The decent living approach consisting in evaluating the degree of objective basic need satisfaction instead of assessing subjective utility or happiness allows addressing the question of carbon transition within the planetary boundaries framework. The harmonious living variable, computed as a socio-ecological efficiency coefficient, is one of the main results of the SEN-HARP model. It encapsulates satisfaction of basic needs into the planet boundaries as defined by Raworth and allows translation into dimensional social floors. Voting behaviour is determined by individual and aggregate harmonious living outcomes.

The Society-Economy-Nature (SEN-HARP) model therefore assesses together the climatic, economic, and socio-political feasibility of various policy scenarios.

Calibration

The model is micro- and macro-calibrated on the EU27 taken as an aggregate unified region. Base year is 2021-22 for calibration. The total time step is 25 years which allows simulating trajectories until 2050, that is the main deadline for decarbonization commitments (net-zero) made by the international community.

Policy scenarios

Researchers of the University fo Bordeaux used the model to simulate three possible policy scenarios beside the business-as-usual: innovation and market-based, augmented Green Deal, and Harmonious living.

1. 1. The innovation and market-based scenario, Green_Deal scenario,  associates policies of carbon pricing and use of tax revenues to provide support to green innovation. This roughly amounts to the version 1 of the European Green Deal, that is the policy conducted for the last decade by European authorities and national governments.
   2. The Augmented Green Deal represents an extension of the previous policy package. Researchers simulate three alternative versions of the augmented Green Deal.
      Aug_Green_Deal_1 constitutes a Green Deal augmented by an active and offensive industrial policy. The objective of this policy is to accelerate European reindustrialisation in green activities and to phase out carbon industries. This approach is to be implemented as a first step before ratcheting up carbon pricing and norms. This will occur once industrial actors have joined the decarbonisation coalition.
      Aug_Green_Deal_2 is the Green Deal, augmented by redistributive measures in favour of transition losers (i.e. consumers and industries) in order to compensate for losses incurred due to high carbon prices and structural change towards green activities. Aug_Green_Deal_1 corresponds to a supply-led transition scenario while Aug_Green_Deal_2 is more consistent with a demand-led transition scenario.
      The maximalist Aug_Green_Deal_3 combines demand- and supply-led policy scenarios, with a view to investigating the fiscal and monetary space for making this combination feasible.
   3. Harmonious Living scenario is a pioneering strategy that prioritises decent living and environmental targets over income and technology targets. The scenario articulates carbon pricing and norms with revenue recycling through substantial investment in public and private provisioning systems that support low-carbon basic needs satisfaction and positive loops between nature, the economy and society. This scenario corresponds to a breakthrough scenario, insofar as it implies a deep revision of the European welfare model, together with a post-growth orientation. If implemented abruptly, this scenario may well provoke opposition from large parts of the European population. A crucial aspect to explore here is the policy mix and sequencing that might render this breakthrough scenario both economically and politically feasible.

    

Read the full scenario analysis and discussion