Just Transition Score: measuring the relative sustainability of social progress

Abstract

Sustainable development of countries necessitates parallel enhancements of societal wellbeing and reductions of environmental impacts. To track how countries perform to achieve these twin objectives, we introduce and calculate a novel metric called the Just Transition Score (JTS) that aims to assess countries' relative sustainability of social progress. Based on the content of environmental impacts per a unit of progress, we calculate the JTS for 161 countries from 2011 to 2019. Additionally, we break down the aggregate indicator into two main components, namely the Carbon Just Transition Score, and the Material Just Transition Score. The results show significant disparities across countries both in terms of the overall JTS and its components. Countries with the best JTS performance, such as Portugal, Spain, and Costa Rica achieve the most sustainable social progress, while countries with the lowest JTS scores either fall short on social progress (the poorest countries) or create high environmental damage (such as the Gulf countries). The relative sustainability of social progress of poorer countries can be improved by increases in societal wellbeing while limiting growth of their environmental impacts. In richer countries, improvements would require more aggressive measures aimed at reducing the extent of environmental damage.