2025-08-27 | Conference Paper
Contributors: Aditya Kapoor, Gemma Dolores Molero, Francisco Enrique Santarremigia, Mehdi Zarehparast Malekzadeh, Ashwani Kumar Malviya, Tom Flynn, Maria Chiara Leva
Abstract: The FITTER-EU project addresses critical challenges to help ensure that a fair and inclusive twin transition encompassing both green and digital transformation, in Europe are delivered. The project takes a process-oriented approach with the aim to replicate and extend it to multiple contexts/sectors throughout Europe. For benchmarking purposes, the project implements the approach in six use cases – Germany, Hungary, Italy, Ireland, Spain, and Portugal, covering four important sectors – Energy, transport, building, and agri-food/agriculture. This paper introduces an innovative evolutionary tree framework to map the project’s developmental stages from data collection to the final policy-relevant outputs, similar to the evolution of a tree through the seasons —Winter (Research inputs and foundation), Spring (Progression and fine-tuning of research towards actionability), and Summer (policy-level decision-making – Influence, Impact, and Guidelines)—each illustrated by distinct figures (Figures 2–4). The fruit-bearing “Summer” season in the FITTER-EU project becomes possible through the development of the FITTER Digital Platform, which is powered by an intelligent decision-support system for policymakers. Thus, the platform is the fruit, or the manifestation of the project research work carried out across the preceding seasons, including data gathering, scenario building, vulnerability mapping, along with complex operation insights. It is symbolic of the strength of the roots that support the FITTER-EU evolutionary tree and that ultimately help produce the fruit. The digital platform will be used to identify and mitigate risks of social exclusion among vulnerable groups during the twin transition. Preliminary outcomes include the development of scenarios for a vulnerability risk assessment with respect to the socio-economic factors in the twin-transition oriented strategic policy objectives and mechanisms in the four important sectors that form the basis of the vulnerability mapping process. Further, these findings inform targeted policy interventions and underpin the development of the best practice guides. The innovation of this work lies in its potential to drive anticipatory governance and ensure that transition policies do not inadvertently exacerbate existing inequalities. Further developments will focus on scaling up the platform, integrating real-time data, and refining composite indicators to adapt to evolving socio-economic conditions.