
In this blog, Shahra Razavi, Ian Orton, Jana Bischler, Umberto Cattaneo, Krithi Dakshina Ramaswamy, Isabella Kopp, Celine Peyron Bista, Lou Tessier and Veronika Wodsak discuss the main findings of the new ILO World Social Protection Report 2024: Universal social protection for climate action for a just transition and distil the implications for climate justice.
The ILO’s new World Social Protection Report provides a comprehensive global overview of the state of social protection and addresses the gravest threat to social justice: the climate crisis. It illustrates how social protection systems protect against everyday risks and shield individuals from the consequences of climate breakdown such as extreme weather and rising temperatures. It also shows how social protection can support much-needed climate policies – through its substantial redistributive effects that lessen potential economic hardship – and help catalyse a just transition to a more sustainable planet.
The report offers grounds for optimism. For the first time, over half of the global population — 52.4 per cent — benefit from some form of social protection, marking a significant improvement from the 42.8 per cent recorded for 2015.
However, this modest progress conceals an unpalatable reality that gives little cause for celebration. The pace at which we are closing protection gaps is too slow if we want to be ready for a more climatically volatile world. If progress were to continue at this rate at the global level, it would take another 49 years – until 2073 – for everyone to be covered, and an unfathomable 339 years in low-income countries. But this trajectory is not fixed, and with the right policy choices the pace of extension can be hastened substantially.
Nevertheless, a distressingly high number of individuals remain unprotected against common lifecycle risks such as illness, poverty, unemployment or lack of income security in old age. Worldwide, 3.8 billion people, predominantly in the Global South, lack any form of social protection. The most urgent challenge is protecting those at the frontline of the climate crisis. In the 20 most climate-vulnerable countries, 91.3 per cent of the population, or 364 million individuals, are without social protection.
Pronounced gender gaps in social protection coverage are another cause for concern. Women’s coverage lags behind men’s with 50.1 and 54.6 per cent, respectively. This inequality continues to hold women and girls back and compounds their more limited access to labour markets and disproportionate responsibility for the unpaid provisioning of their households. This weakens their capacity to adapt and excludes them from new economic opportunities that open up. Social protection systems must become more gender-responsive as part of a larger set of policies to address inequalities in labour markets, employment and society at large.
The stark disparity in the realization of the right to social protection is a reflection of our deeply unequal world. And the consequences of these protection gaps are already severe and will only intensify as these populations face escalating climate breakdown. This is not the way to proceed towards a just transition in the context of a more volatile climate future.
Fortunately, we have at our fingertips many of the policy mechanisms needed to protect people from everyday risks and those arising from climate change, while also supporting climate action. The challenge is not one of a dearth of good policy ideas but lies more with insufficient political will and financing.
Enabling mitigation and adaptation efforts and generating support for climate policies
Promising examples of mitigation – that is stopping the drivers of climate change – can be seen in the progressive and careful phasing out of (often regressive) fossil fuel subsidies. This would in effect free more fiscal space for further investment in social protection, as many countries are doing, including Iran and Senegal. Such reforms could drastically reduce CO2 emissions, raise revenue, and would amount to savings of 1.2 per cent of GDP in low- and middle-income countries (Cattaneo et al. 2024). This could also prevent untold deaths caused by air pollution annually. But this needs to be done carefully, and sequencing is key, with social protection benefits already in place to support households (not only the poorest) before the subsidies are removed. Moreover, the greening of pension funds, both public and private, holds great promise. Enormous tranches of global capital – USD53 trillion – are nestled in these funds in the OECD alone (UNCTAD 2023). Prudently divesting these funds from fossil fuels would help mitigation efforts. And countries like Denmark and Canada have been doing this with their public pension funds.
Social protection can also help people adapt to climate change by providing income security and access to healthcare without hardship to increase their resilience. This helps prevent poverty and social exclusion, reduces inequality ex-ante and raises people’s capacity to cope and adapt. For example, social health protection will help people deal with the spread of new and existing diseases engendered by the climate crisis and biodiversity loss. A healthier population is also way better placed to cope with challenges like higher temperatures and the associated cardiovascular risks.
Other examples of adaptation range from simple scheme modification to leveraging whole systems. Some countries, such as Algeria, are using their social protection schemes to compensate workers for lost wages on days when it is too hot to work in sectors like construction. And Brazil leveraged its existing social protection system to respond to recent floods to provide vital support to affected populations. Pensioners and recipients of social assistance and unemployment benefits received higher and quicker benefit payments to deal with heightened financial stress. This can be done when you already have a social protection system in place.
Social protection not only safeguards individuals from poverty and reduces inequality, but it also generates public support for climate policies. And the exigency of a just transition could open more policy space for taking bold action in that direction. This may enable countries pursuing ambitious plans to phase out fossil fuels and shift to renewables while also supporting workers to make this transition.
Filling financing gaps to realise climate justice
Governments are not fully harnessing the potential of social protection largely due to persistent gaps in coverage and adequacy caused by significant underinvestment. On average, countries allocate 12.9 per cent of their GDP to social protection (excluding health care). However, low-and middle-income countries invest a mere 7.8 per cent of their GDP, and much higher investment would be required to ensure a basic level of social protection for all. Filling the social protection financing gap in 2024 would cost 3.3 per cent of GDP in these countries (Cattaneo et al. 2024).
Filling these gaps to guarantee minimum social protection for everyone requires concerted international cooperation. This entails prioritizing investment in social protection, including external support mechanisms like loss and damage funding, especially for countries with limited fiscal space.
Filling the financing gap also requires greater fiscal justice with increased tax progressivity while ending tax evasion and avoidance both nationally and internationally. Managing the escalating debt servicing costs of many developing countries, which are now spending more on interest rate payments than on social protection, would also be key. It also requires an increase in climate finance to complement overseas development assistance (ODA). However, studies show that, since 2018, over half of the climate finance provided by developed nations was not additional to their existing development aid (Mitchell, Ritchie, and Tahmasebi 2021).
It also means not shirking away from ‘climate justice’ in the quest for social protection for all. The Global North[1] is historically responsible for 92 per cent of the excess carbon dioxide emissions between 1850-2015 that are driving climate breakdown (Hickel 2020). And, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP, 2023) estimates that, in 2022, collectively, the G20 accounted for 76 per cent of global GHG emissions whereas the least developed countries and small island states (SIDS) accounted for 3.8 per cent and 1 per cent respectively. This stark ‘responsibility gap’ places the onus on the wealthiest economies not only to curb their own emissions but also to support other countries facing the climate crisis. Those countries most impacted by the climate crisis, such as SIDS, need fiscal space to build their national social protection systems and invest in social policies that will help their populations cope with climate change. Thus, rich countries have an ecological debt to pay to atone for a climate crisis already wreaking havoc.
Helping to finance and build social protection systems in low-income countries is just one of the ways this can be done to help correct this social injustice, as depicted vividly in Figure 1. We see that almost exclusively higher-income countries (bottom right-hand quadrant) enjoy high social protection coverage and low exposure to climate change risks, while simultaneously, being responsible for the highest GHG emissions both historically and on a per capita basis. In contrast, the converse is almost entirely true for lower-income countries at the frontline of the climate crisis and enduring its worst effects.
It is in all our interests to rectify this injustice, as the climate crisis poses a major risk for potential conflict and social unrest (Lenton et al. 2023; Guterres 2023). Thus supporting the development of countries’ social protection systems could lessen or help stave off this risk and promote peace which is central to the UN’s and the ILO’s mandate as well as the “promotion of the common welfare”.[2]
Figure 1: The relationship between a country’s vulnerability (score) to climate change and social protection coverage (percentage), by income level 2023, and by cumulative greenhouse gas emissions since 1850 (CO2 equivalents)

Note: Cumulative CO2 equivalent emissions in units Pg CO2-e100 during 1851–2022.
Sources: Jones et al (2024), Notre Dame Global Adaptation Initiative Country Index, ILO World Social Protection Database.
If we are serious about a just transition, it must be guided by equity and fairness, which demands social justice. A focus on climate justice is also critical as this captures historical emissions responsibility – the expropriation of natural resources and the exploitation of cheap labour from poor women and colonized and racialized groups (UN Women 2023) – reinforcing the responsibility of richer countries towards lower-income countries. It also means richer groups in every society, who invariably have a larger carbon footprint, should contribute their fair share too (Schutter 2024). These are elementary moral principles that are difficult to contest (Chomsky and Pollin 2020).
Supporting the expansion of social protection based on climate and financial justice would constitute a powerful restitutive act and contribute to rectifying long-standing global and domestic inequalities and inequities rendered even more pronounced by the climate crisis. And it might just give people in these countries a fighting chance of contending with the lifecycle and climate risks ahead. Given that social protection makes a vital contribution to social justice and a just transition, this can ultimately enable more climate ambition.
[1] Defined as the USA, Canada, Europe, Israel, Australia, New Zealand, and Japan (Hickel 2020).
[2] ILO. 1944. Declaration of Philadelphia
References
Cattaneo, U., Schwarzer, H., Razavi, S., Visentin, A. 2024. Financing gap for universal social protection: Global, regional and national estimates and strategies for creating fiscal space, ILO Working Paper 113 (Geneva, ILO).
Chomsky, Noam, and Robert Pollin. 2020. Climate Crisis and the Global Green New Deal. Edited by C.J. Polychroniou. Verso.
Guterres, Antonio. 2023. ‘Secretary-General’s Remarks to the Virtual G20 Summit’. United Nations.
Hickel, Jason. 2020. ‘Quantifying National Responsibility for Climate Breakdown: An Equality-Based Attribution Approach for Carbon Dioxide Emissions in Excess of the Planetary Boundary’. The Lancet. Planetary Health 4 (9): e399–404.
Jones, Matthew W., Glen P. Peters, Thomas Gasser, Robbie M. Andrew, Clemens Schwingshackl, Johannes Gütschow, Richard A. Houghton, Pierre Friedlingstein, Julia Pongratz, and Corinne Le Quéré. 2024. ‘National Contributions to Climate Change Due to Historical Emissions of Carbon Dioxide, Methane and Nitrous Oxide’. Zenodo.
Lenton, Timothy M., David I. Armstrong McKay, Sina Loriani, Jesse F. Abrams, Steven J. Lade, Jonathan F. Donges, Manjana Milkoreit, Tom Powell, Steven R. Smith, and Caroline Zimm. 2023. ‘The Global Tipping Points Report 2023’. University of Exeter.
Mitchell, Ian, Euan Ritchie, and Atousa Tahmasebi. 2021. ‘Is Climate Finance Towards $100 Billion “New and Additional”?’ CDG Policy Paper No. 205. Centre for Global Development.
UN Women. 2023. ‘Feminist Climate Justice: A Framework for Action’. New York: UN Women.
UNCTAD. 2023. ‘Sustainability Integration by Public Pension and Sovereign Wealth Funds, 2022’.
UNEP. 2023. ‘Broken Record: Temperatures Hit New Highs, yet World Fails to Cut Emissions (Again)’.