Just Climate Futures: Why the Net Zero Transition Must Put Social Inclusion First

The race to net zero has become the defining policy project of the twenty-first century, with governments around the world committing themselves to legally binding targets for eliminating greenhouse gas emissions. Yet as decarbonisation accelerates, a growing body of scholarship warns that the transition itself can create new winners and losers. A recent book review published in the Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences examines one of the most important contributions to this debate: Just Climate Futures: Integrating Social Inclusion into the Net Zero Transition, written by Carolyn Snell and Lucie Middlemiss and published by Bristol University Press in 2025. The review, authored by Sining Zhao of Lund University, positions the book as a timely intervention in a field that has expanded rapidly over the past decade.

The central argument of the book, as framed by the review, is that climate policy and social policy cannot be treated as separate domains. When governments phase out internal combustion engines, retrofit homes for energy efficiency, or restructure energy systems around renewables, the costs and benefits of those changes are distributed unevenly across society. Low-income households, older people, renters, and communities dependent on carbon-intensive industries often face the steepest barriers to participating in the new low-carbon economy. Snell and Middlemiss, both established researchers on energy and poverty, argue that a transition which ignores these distributional questions risks being both unjust and politically fragile.

This concern sits within a broader intellectual tradition known as the just transition. The concept originated in the labour movement as a demand that workers displaced by environmental regulation should not be abandoned, and it has since been widened considerably. Scholars such as Newell and Mulvaney, whose work on the political economy of just transition is cited in the review, have traced how the term has travelled from union bargaining tables into national climate plans and international governance frameworks. More recent analyses, including a 2023 study by Newell and colleagues on the global governance of just transitions, have highlighted persistent gaps between the rhetoric of justice and the institutional machinery needed to deliver it.

Parallel to this, the field of energy justice has developed a conceptual vocabulary for evaluating energy systems. Jenkins and colleagues, in a widely cited 2016 conceptual review, distinguished between distributive justice, which concerns who bears costs and receives benefits; procedural justice, which concerns who participates in decision-making; and recognition justice, which concerns whose needs and identities are acknowledged by policy. Healy and Barry extended this framework by politicising energy transitions, arguing that questions of who owns and controls energy infrastructure are inseparable from questions of fairness. Schlosberg and Collins similarly traced the evolution from environmental justice to climate justice, showing how the discourse has broadened from the siting of polluting facilities to the global inequities of climate impacts and responses.

What distinguishes Snell and Middlemiss’s contribution, according to the review, is its explicit integration of social inclusion research into this justice-oriented landscape. Social exclusion, as conceptualised in the influential multi-dimensional analysis by Levitas and colleagues, is not simply a lack of income but a compound condition involving restricted access to resources, services, social relations, and political voice. By bringing this framework into conversation with climate policy, the authors are able to show that the populations most at risk of exclusion from mainstream society are frequently the same populations most burdened by decarbonisation measures. A household in fuel poverty, for instance, may be unable to afford the upfront costs of a heat pump, may rent a property where efficiency upgrades require landlord consent, and may lack the political leverage to influence local energy planning.

The review situates the book within what Wibeck and colleagues describe in 2026 as the widening scope of just transitions research. What began as a concern with coal miners and oil workers has expanded to encompass consumers, communities, and entire regions, and increasingly to questions of global equity between the Global North and South. Wang and Lo’s 2021 conceptual review documented this proliferation of meanings, noting that the term just transition is now invoked by actors with sharply different interests, from trade unions to corporations to multilateral institutions. In this crowded conceptual space, a book that grounds the discussion in the concrete, measurable realities of social exclusion performs a valuable clarifying function.

Technical detail matters here, because the mechanisms of exclusion in the net zero transition are often embedded in the design of policy instruments themselves. Grant-based retrofit schemes typically require homeowners to pay upfront costs and reclaim money later, a structure that systematically excludes households without savings or access to credit. Electric vehicle subsidies disproportionately benefit higher-income buyers who can afford new cars, while the used-car market, second-hand market, and public transport alternatives receive less support. Carbon pricing, the economist’s favoured tool, is frequently regressive in its incidence, taking a larger share of income from poorer households unless revenues are recycled progressively. Snell and Middlemiss’s analysis, as reflected in the review, pushes policymakers to examine these design features rather than treating injustice as an unfortunate side effect to be remedied after the fact.

The book also speaks to a growing mobility justice critique of technology-centred transition strategies. Henderson’s 2020 argument that electric vehicles are not the answer exemplifies this line of thought: replacing every internal combustion car with an electric equivalent would do little to address congestion, road danger, sedentary lifestyles, or the exclusion of those who cannot drive at all. A genuinely just climate future, on this view, requires rethinking systems of provision rather than swapping the energy source that powers them. This systems perspective aligns with the book’s emphasis on inclusion, since questions about who benefits from transport, housing, and energy systems are inherently questions about social structure, not merely about technology.

Zhao’s review, published on 2 October 2026, presents the book as a synthesis that will be useful to researchers, students, and policymakers alike, drawing together literatures that too often run in parallel. The reviewer, who conceived and wrote the review independently and declares no competing interests and no specific funding, frames the book’s core achievement as demonstrating that social inclusion is not an optional add-on to climate policy but a precondition for its success. Transitions that leave large groups behind generate resistance, erode public consent, and can stall precisely the decarbonisation they were meant to advance. The political turbulence that has accompanied fuel taxes, low-emission zones, and boiler replacement schemes in several countries illustrates the practical stakes of this argument.

As net zero deadlines draw closer, the questions raised by Just Climate Futures are likely to become only more pressing. Who decides which communities are transformed first, and who sits at the table when those decisions are made? How are the costs of grid upgrades, home retrofits, and industrial restructuring shared between taxpayers, energy users, and shareholders? And how can policy be designed so that the households with the least capacity to adapt are protected rather than penalised? Snell and Middlemiss do not claim that these tensions can be resolved by technical fixes alone. Their contribution, as the review makes clear, is to insist that a credible climate strategy must be measured not only in tonnes of carbon avoided but in the fairness of the society it builds, ensuring that the path to a low-carbon future is one that people from all walks of life can walk together.

Subject of Research: Social inclusion and justice in the net zero climate transition

Article Title: Carolyn Snell and Lucie Middlemiss. Just climate futures: integrating social inclusion into the net zero transition

Article References: Zhao, S. (2026). Carolyn Snell and Lucie Middlemiss. Just climate futures: integrating social inclusion into the net zero transition. Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13412-026-01150-8

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s13412-026-01150-8

Keywords: just transition, net zero, energy justice, social inclusion, climate policy, fuel poverty, social exclusion, decarbonisation, environmental justice, climate equity, energy transition, book review