O Estado Ecosocial

Climate change and the relevant measures to combat it, will have a considerable impact on the welfare state and social protection systems. From a broader concept of social protection, the calculation of costs and benefits needs to be addressed in a way that simultaneously serves both environmental and social policy objectives. Along these lines, the paper aims to address, first, the insertion of social protection in a broader field of state intervention and, second, the sharing of responsibilities between individuals, societies and political communities that underpins our understanding of the welfare state and, in this regard, of the social welfare state if we take this more general and common term as an equivalent of the former. Both issues deal with matters relating to the social market economy and the foundations of our political communities that will be influenced during the Anthropocene. The latter as a consequence of foreseeable climate change, and the former as a consequence of the measures deemed necessary to keep the threat of global warming at bay to some extent.