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The need to better understand and monitor the linkages between social exclusion and unsustainable development, and the quest for a toolkit to assess the social impacts of environment policy measures, the European Commission (DG Employment) convened a workshop for scientific support for promoting social fairness in sustainable development in Brussels on 23 February 2009.  R. Andreas Kraemer of Ecologic Institute was invited to speak on social exclusion and a poor environment.

The key messages of the presentation are:

• There is significant environmental injustice, or lack of environmental justice, even in well-governed Member States of the European Union.  This is largely ignored in political debates, which have focused predominantly on the just distribution of income;
• Policy-makers should better understand all dimensions of injustice, and take full account of inequalities in, for instance, health, environment, or education;
• There are a number of specific policy options providing social and environmental benefits in parallel, such as retrofitting and insulating existing rental housing for low-income tenants, changes in low-income support for energy costs and the redistribution of revenue from energy taxes to low-income groups, or the expansion and upgrading of public transport systems.

Further links:

• Links between the social and environmental pillars of sustainable development, Ecologic Institute project for DG Employment of the European Commission
• Environmental Policies and Social Justice, Ecologic Institute project for the German Federal Environmental Agency
• Bringt mehr Umweltschutz mehr Gerechtigkeit? [Better Justice from Better Protection of the Environment?], Article (in German) by Nils Meyer-Ohlendorf