Review by Muhammad Hammad

Universal Social Protection: Essential for Life-Cycle and Climate Resilience

As the world faces the escalating climate crisis, social protection is increasingly recognized as essential for both climate mitigation/adaptation and a just transition. The report argues that strong, universal social protection systems must deliver a dual purpose: protecting people from ordinary life-cycle risks — childhood, unemployment, illness, old age — and supporting climate action. With the planet already 1.1°C warmer and risks of tipping points beyond 2°C, climate change is now the biggest threat to poverty reduction, decent work and social justice.

The paradox is that the most vulnerable populations who contributed least to emissions suffer the most, with climate change projected to push an additional 132 million people into extreme poverty by 2030 without action.

Social protection is indispensable for three reasons: 1) as an adaptation strategy — providing income security and healthcare to help people cope with extreme weather, slow-onset changes, and loss and damage; 2) as a buffer for mitigation policies — supporting workers and households adversely affected by green transitions and rising prices, and enabling reskilling for green jobs; and 3) as a mechanism for equity — reducing inequality through risk-sharing and solidarity, both within and between countries.

However, without universal, adequate, and adaptive social protection, climate ambitions will fail and risk triggering negative social tipping points — displacement, polarization, and unrest. The report, based on the ILO World Social Protection Database and Social Security Inquiry, monitors global coverage, adequacy, and financing gaps, and finds that progress toward SDG target 1.3 requires stronger national data systems. With only six years to 2030, it calls for placing universal social protection at the heart of climate plans, NDCs, and national adaptation plans to ensure climate action is resilient, inclusive, and leaves no one behind.

Social Protection for a Just Climate Transition       

Balancing enterprise continuity and wider societal support is critical in climate shocks. Social protection can help firms avoid layoffs through contribution freezes, furlough and short-time work schemes — widely used during COVID-19 — but equity matters where large populations are affected, not just workers.

For climate-induced forced displacement, which reached 108.4 million people in 2022 and is worsened by slow-onset events like sea-level rise and drought, displaced people face legal exclusion, remote locations, and lack of documents, often ending in vulnerable informal work. Integrating them into national systems, rather than parallel humanitarian systems, avoids undermining social cohesion and bridges humanitarian-development divides.

Beyond immediate coping, social protection builds long-term adaptive capacity. Benefits enable productive investments, livelihood diversification, and human development — e.g., child benefits supporting education, or pensions supporting agricultural assets in Bangladesh and Zambia — but income alone can cause maladaptation without complementary services like drought-resistant seeds, agricultural extension, or training for sustainable farming and fishing.

The literature argues for transformative, not just incremental, adaptation: rights-based universal systems rather than narrowly poverty-targeted safety nets, which often have high exclusion errors and fail to cover the 3.3-3.6 billion people vulnerable to climate change, including urban migrants in informal settlements. Universal coverage also strengthens health security, as COVID-19 showed that countries with high prior coverage and sickness benefits responded more effectively.

Social protection also enables climate mitigation and a just transition. For fossil fuel subsidy reform and carbon pricing — which could cut emissions 43% below baseline and raise 3.6% of global GDP — recycling revenues through social protection prevents poverty spikes and builds public acceptance; Morocco expanded child benefits and health insurance after subsidy removal, while Ecuador’s reform failed when compensation was delayed.

For workers, linking unemployment protection with job placement, reskilling, and formalization is essential as green transition creates net jobs but causes frictional losses, especially for informal, lower-skilled, and women workers.

Finally, social protection can directly contribute to mitigation by greening pension funds — $53 trillion in OECD alone — divesting from fossil fuels, and by linking cash transfers and public works to ecosystem protection, like Brazil’s Bolsa Verde reducing deforestation by 22% and Ethiopia’s Productive Safety Net Program enhancing carbon sequestration.  

Closing Gaps, Strengthening Social Protection Systems

Universal, comprehensive and adaptive social protection is indispensable for climate action, yet progress is too slow and largely temporary. More than half the world (52.4%) is now covered by at least one benefit — up 9.6 points since 2015 — but 3.8 billion remain unprotected. The gap is starkest where risk is highest: only 25% coverage in the 50 most climate-vulnerable countries (2.1 billion unprotected) and 8.7% in the 20 most vulnerable. At current rates, universal coverage would take 49 years, until 2073. High-income countries reached 85.9% coverage, while low-income countries stagnated at 9.7%.

By function, old-age pensions lead at 79.6%, while child benefits (28.2%), maternity (36.4%), disability (38.9%), employment injury (37.4%), unemployment (16.7%), social assistance (37.3%) and health protection (60.1%, stalled) lag far behind.

A major driver is the “missing middle”: temporary, part-time, platform, self-employed and small-enterprise workers who fall between contributory and tax-financed schemes, plus migrants and women who face 4.5-point lower coverage than men. Regionally, Africa (19.1%) and Arab States (30%) made minimal gains despite high climate exposure.

Closing these gaps requires getting the basics right: universal legal and effective coverage, adequate benefits, sustainable financing, and climate-ready institutions. In 2023, social protection spending averaged 19.3% of GDP (12.9% income security + 6.5% health), but 25% in high-income vs. 2% in low-income countries. Low- and middle-income countries need an extra $1.4 trillion per year — 3.3% of GDP (2% health, 1.3% cash benefits) — to guarantee a floor; for low-income countries alone the gap is 52.3% of GDP ($308.5 billion).

Repurposing fossil fuel subsidies can help: explicit and implicit subsidies equal 1.2% and 9.7% of GDP in low- and middle-income countries versus the 3.3% gap, though potential is limited in low-income countries (1.0% + 2.6%), requiring international support. Systems must adapt through automatic triggers, ad-hoc vertical/horizontal expansions, indexation, climate-sensitive health benefits, contingency planning, digitalized and interoperable registries linked to early warning and disaster data, and rights-based strategies built through social dialogue to support both life-cycle risks and a just transition.

Social Protection for All across the Life Course

Social protection is essential for realizing children’s rights and breaking cycles of poverty, labour, disease and missed education, yet the climate crisis has been called “structural violence against children” — 1 in 4 under-5 deaths are linked to environmental damage, with children highly vulnerable to heat, disease and food insecurity. Progress on extreme child poverty has stalled due to COVID-19, with 3 years of gains lost: 333 million children still live under $2.15/day, 820 million under $3.65, 1.4 billion under $6.85, and 1 billion in multidimensional poverty.

Climate risks both drive and result from poverty — 6 in 10 multidimensional poor children face at least one climate hazard yearly — while children in high-risk areas have the least social protection, and girls, children with disabilities, migrants and indigenous children face intersecting inequalities.

Only 23.9% of children 0-18 are covered, leaving 1.8 billion uncovered and just 7.6% in low-income countries; coverage grew modestly from 22.1% in 2015 to 28.2% in 2023 for 0-15, but Africa and Asia-Pacific still have 493 million and 765 million uncovered children respectively. While 145 of 213 countries have statutory child benefits, spending is only 0.7% of GDP globally and 3.8% of total social protection spending. Closing the gap would require an extra $59.6 billion for low-income (10.1% GDP), $88.8 billion for lower-middle (1% GDP) and $98.1 billion for upper-middle-income countries.

Evidence shows universal child benefits — currently in only 58 countries — can cut child poverty by 5 points on average, and is more effective when combined with services, gender-responsive design, school feeding, and shock-responsive mechanisms triggered by weather thresholds. Repurposing regressive fossil fuel subsidies and leveraging climate finance, including loss and damage funds, are proposed as equitable ways to finance adequate, rights-based, inclusive and sustainable child-sensitive systems.

Policy Orientations

Universal social protection is indispensable for a fair, secure and green transition — without it, climate adaptation and mitigation risk deepening vulnerability, inequality and eroding the social contract, while making climate policies politically unsustainable.

Progress since 2015 is insufficient, so the report calls for a pivot from merely reducing poverty to preventing it, by guaranteeing a rights-based national social protection floor for all — especially uncovered rural, indigenous, migrant and displaced groups — and progressively reaching higher, adequate levels through inclusive social insurance + tax-financed schemes that provide health, sickness, employment-injury and income security.

Systems must be gender-responsive, link cash benefits with quality childcare, long-term care and health services to recognize and redistribute unpaid care, and enable workers in all forms of employment to navigate formalization and green structural change. Delivering this requires strong legal frameworks anchored in international standards, participatory social dialogue, resilient delivery systems, and sustainable equitable financing: domestic resource mobilization, progressive taxation, reprioritization and anti-evasion, plus international solidarity for low-income countries facing a 52.3% GDP financing gap, and harnessing climate finance, fossil fuel subsidy reform and carbon pricing revenues to fill gaps and compensate households, thereby renewing the social contract for social justice within planetary boundaries.