Eurofound and the European Environment Agency (EEA) organised a live interactive webinar on ‘Understanding the socioeconomic impact of the EU's transition to a climate-neutral economy’ with a live Q&A on Tuesday 20 June 2023.
The EU has set itself ambitious targets for achieving climate neutrality by 2050, as outlined in its 2020 Green Deal. It aims to promote EU cohesion and maintain social fairness and inclusiveness, key objectives of the European Pillar of Social Rights. The precise trajectory that this transition will take is however uncertain. What is needed to make this goal a reality is nothing short of a clean industrial revolution.
Against this background, Eurofound and the European Environment Agency (EEA) organised a webinar to explore how the EU can ensure that plans for a green and Just Transition become a reality.
The webinar was moderated by Mary McCaughey, Head of Information and Communication at Eurofound, and offered a lively debate as well as a LIVE online Q&A with experts from a range of areas, including Maria Jepsen, Deputy Director, Eurofound, and Jock Martin, Head of Coordination, Networks and Strategy (CNS) at the EEA, who addressed questions such as:
The challenges facing EU policymakers are many and complex. On the one hand, the industrial restructuring required for the transition depends on successfully leveraging mission-driven innovation to secure the economic prosperity of European regions. On the other, socioeconomic policies will be required to deliver fair results for citizens across EU Member States and regions and ensure public support for the transition.
This #EurofoundLive webinar enabled a rich discussion that covered the many aspects and drew on the European agencies’ findings and knowledge to examine how the EU can strengthen the socioeconomic dimension of the Green Deal and secure the buy-in of citizens on measures to help combat climate change.
 | Speaker: Maria Jepsen, Deputy Director, Eurofound Maria Jepsen was appointed Deputy Director at Eurofound in 2019. Prior to this, she was Director of the research department at the European Trade Union Institute (ETUI), and assistant professor and research fellow at the Free University of Brussels (ULB). She is currently also associate professor in labour economics at ULB and external lecturer at the Catholic University of Louvain (UCL). Her main research interests include gender studies, the impact of welfare states on labour supply, wages and working conditions, and more recently the European social dimension. Maria has also served as a coordinator on the European Commission tripartite advisory committee on health and safety at work. She holds a PhD in Economics and a Master’s degree in Econometrics from the Free University of Brussels (ULB). |
 | Speaker: Jock Martin, Head of Coordination, Networks and Strategy, European Environment Agency Jock Martin has worked at the European Environment Agency for 25 years and is currently Head of Coordination, Networking and Strategy programme where he is responsible for orchestrating stakeholder interactions, networks and partnership and steering future developments under the EEA-Eionet Strategy 2030. Since joining the EEA, he has been strongly involved in delivering outcomes across the knowledge chain from monitoring and reporting to data and indicators, to integrated assessments and what they mean for policy. In particular, he has authored and coordinated several EEA integrated assessment reports including several five year European state of the environment and outlook (SOER) reports. SOER 2020 helped frame the European Green Deal and 8th Environmental Action Programme objectives, while previous SOERs have informed environmental sustainability priorities of EU research programmes and the objectives of previous EU Environmental Action Programmes. |
 | Moderator: Mary McCaughey, Head of Information and Communication, Eurofound Mary is Head of Information and Communication in Eurofound. A graduate of Trinity College, Dublin and the College of Europe, Bruges, she started work in Brussels with Europolitics and the Wall Street Journal Europe. She worked with the Association of European Parliamentarians with Africa (AWEPA) in South Africa during the country’s transition to democracy, and in 1998 she took up the post of spokesperson with the Delegation of the European Union in Pretoria, heading up its press and information department during the negotiation of the EU–South Africa free trade agreement. Following the end of the Kosovo War, she worked as a communications consultant for the European Agency for Reconstruction in Serbia. She took up the post of Editor-in-Chief in Eurofound in 2003. |
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