The article spells out four domains of international distributive justice and the consequent criteria of equity, the purpose being to identify a pluralistic normative ethical framework for climate mitigation and adaptation strategies. Justice and equity should play a major role in favouring collective action against climate change, because the more the various dimensions of such action are just, the more any international climate initiative is feasible in principle. As far as mitigation is concerned, the definition of a just initial allocation of endowments focuses on the criterion of differentiated equality, taking account of undeserved inequalities as suggested by Rawls' theory of justice as fairness. With regard to the subsequent exchange of endowments, the Pareto principle, supplemented by the envy-freeness one, is a viable option. Possibly a sound reference for the just financing of adaptation activities is the criterion of differentiated historical responsibility, backed by Rawls' theory of justice as fairness. As regards the allocation of adaptation resources, the criterion of lack of human security, as substantiated in Sen's capability approach, seems promising.

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High-end climate change requires transformative solutions, as conventional strategies and solutions will not be enough if major disruptions in social-ecological systems are to be avoided. However, conventional climate assessment approaches and methods show many limitations if they are to provide robust knowledge and support to the implementation of such solutions in practice. To this end, we define transformative climate science as the open-ended process of producing, structuring, and applying solutionsoriented knowledge to fast-link integrated adaptation and mitigation strategies to sustainable development. In particular, based on our experiences within regional cases in Central Asia, Europe, Iberia, Scotland, and Hungary, we have selected 12 dimensions that scientists and practitioners can use as a checklist to design transformative-oriented climate assessments. While it is possible to talk both about transformative adaptation and transformative mitigation, in this paper, we make the case that societal transformation does not depend on mitigation or adaptation policies and actions, mostly because they are related to sustainability innovations, which are endogenous developments derived from deliberate social learning

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This article carries out a multidimensional analysis of welfare based on the social indicators approach aimed at assessing the quality of life in the 25 member countries of the European Union. It begins with description of the social indicators approach and provides some specifications on its most controversial points. It then specifies the principles on which the social indicators were selected, describes the indicators chosen, and details the methodology employed in the empirical analysis. Its results are subsequently explained, in terms of both quality of life as measured by the general and the partial Quality Of Life (QOL) Indexes, and their correlations with the two indicators commonly employed in the EU context for welfare analyses -GDP per capita and Unemployment Rate. The article also reports further information obtained by plotting the QOL Index against GDP per capita, the Unemployment Rate, and an indicator of subjective well-being.

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