Just Transitions in Australia: moving towards low carbon lives across policy, industry and practice

A transition to a low-carbon economy is perhaps nowhere more crucial or contested than in Australia, a continent on the front line of global heating and climate change-induced bushfires, drought, flash floods and extreme temperatures. The heavy reliance on extractive industries for coal and minerals, and a government caught up in climate denial than transition, exposes some of the political and structural lock-ins to highly carbonised industries and lifestyles. This project will build on a research partnership between RHUL, Monash and a wider network of researchers and advisors in Australia to examine ‘just transitions’ to decarbonisation. It will undertake and aggregate new and existing research to examine actual, possible, partial and failed, examples of ‘just transitions’ across multiple sectoral and societal domains (work, energy and industry, mobility, home, technologies). It will identify, collate and examine different roadmaps for ‘just transition’, examples of good and bad practice, and evaluate their transferability.

Professor Peter Adey, Royal Holloway, University of London; Professor Sarah Pink, Monash University; Professor Rob Raven, Monash University.