World Social Protection Report 2024-26: Universal social protection for climate action & a just transition
This ILO flagship report provides a global overview of progress made around the world since 2015 in extending social protection, with a sharp focus on the climate crisis and the need for climate action to transition to a more sustainable world.
The World Social Protection Report 2024-26 focuses on the climate crisis and the need to transition to a more sustainable world, and provides a global overview of progress made around the world since 2015 in extending social protection. The report identifies protection gaps and sets out key policy recommendations, including those for achieving the targets of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.
For the first time, new trend data indicates that more than half of the world’s population are covered by social protection. But this welcome progress is dampened by the fact that 3.8 billion people are still entirely unprotected from life’s challenges and the impacts of climate change. Universal social protection systems have an important role to play in responding to the climate crisis and can help realise climate ambitions while facilitating a just transition to more sustainable societies. Greater investment in and expansion of social protection systems would support general climate mitigation and adaptation efforts and garner public support for climate policies. The report calls on policymakers, social partners and other stakeholders to accelerate their efforts to simultaneously close protection gaps and realize climate ambitions.
Key Messages
- Social protection makes an important contribution to both climate change adaptation and mitigation
- Social protection is an enabler of climate action and a catalyst for a just transition and greater social justice
- Decisive policy action is required to strengthen social protection systems and adapt them to new realities
- The capacity of social protection systems to contribute to a just transition is held back by persistent gaps in social protection coverage, adequacy and financing
- Social justice must inform climate action and a just transition, with human rights at the heart of the process
Social protection can help ensure no one is left behind. It can contribute to rectifying long-standing global and domestic inequalities and inequities rendered more pronounced by the climate crisis. The climate crisis can only be overcome through common effort but with differentiated responsibility proportional to capacity. It needs to be recognized that special remedial responsibility lies with those primarily responsible for the crisis. This has major implications for financing social protection at the domestic level, and for the role of international financial support for countries with insufficient economic and fiscal capacities that have contributed least to the crisis but are bearing its brunt. This constitutes a key element of social justice.
Executive Summary – World Social Protection Report 2024-26 – PDF 1.18 MB
Full Report is 386 Pages. Executive Summary is 10 Pages.
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