From Kenya to Chile, communities are pushing back against renewable energy projects that promise green progress but deliver few direct benefits. Electricity is often channelled to power private utilities, while not delivering on promises of new local jobs. The result is growing public distrust that could derail the energy transition itself.
In Kenya, poor consultation with local communities led to a landmark ruling that revoked the licence for a proposed geothermal project. In India, a 1-gigawatt (GW) solar project funded by the Asian Development Bank was cancelled in 2025 after protests by tribal communities, who reported a lack of proper consultation and faced the displacement of 20,000 people.
In Chile, wind farms built for green hydrogen exports are meeting resistance as residents say such projects threaten ecosystems and livelihoods. In the Philippines, the Tumandok Indigenous people oppose a mega-hydropower project. They say the project risks flooding their ancestral lands and sacred sites, and has violated their right to free, prior and informed consent. And in Pakistan, the 4-GW Dasu Hydropower Project has already uprooted more than 7,000 people, leaving 34 villages abandoned.
With clean energy mega-projects becoming the norm, as shown in a recent report by CAN International, such conflicts are only likely to increase in number unless things change.
Growth without justice
Despite record expansion, deployment of renewables remains far too slow and far too unequal. Many developing countries are constrained by debt and limited fiscal space, while rich nations continue to over-consume energy.
Even where renewables are rising, the benefits often flow to foreign corporations. And power fed back into national grids frequently enriches independent power producers while leaving consumers with high bills.
For Indian women workers, a just transition means surviving climate impacts with dignity
Egypt illustrates the dilemma. To meet its green hydrogen targets and bring in hard currency to service its debt, the country needs to install 41 GW of renewable capacity by 2030 and 114 GW by 2040 – five to fifteen times its current renewable capacity. Four percent of Egypt’s land has been designated for green hydrogen production, even as droughts and water scarcity worsen.
Under the EU-led Global Gateway initiative, some of this electricity could be exported to Europe through the GREGY interconnector. Meanwhile, Egypt is becoming a hub for ‘green’ data centres, even as rural areas and public healthcare facilities face rolling blackouts.
“Some of the world’s largest solar projects are in Morocco and Egypt – but they’re built mainly for export, not to meet domestic needs,” says Mohamed Kamal, executive director of Greenish, an Egypt-based civil society organisation. “The real challenge now is governance: how to ensure that new investments serve local people first, especially in regions that still lack the infrastructure for consistent energy supply.”
“As we build the renewable energy economy, we must not repeat the mistakes of the fossil fuel era,” he adds. “We cannot look to those failed models for inspiration or replicate their structures of control within the renewable energy value chain.”
A just transition mechanism for renewables at COP30
At COP30 in Belém, civil society networks including Climate Action Network are calling for the Belém Action Mechanism (BAM) for a Just Transition under the UN climate process to make a fair transition real.
COP30 could confront “glaring gap” in clean energy agenda: mining
BAM would bring together the many initiatives now working in isolation, from practitioner alliances to community projects or programmes led by intergovernmental organisations. This will help countries change course by removing structural barriers such as debt, unfair trade rules and limited technology transfer that keep developing countries at the bottom of renewable supply chains.
It will also unlock public finance to support worker upskilling, green industrial policies and inclusive ownership models and distributed renewable systems. Furthermore, it can create structured dialogue between governments, workers and communities to share best practices, strengthen participation and scale up solutions that deliver.
Such a mechanism could help countries develop not only more renewables, but better ones – people-centred, community-led and domestically owned.
Restoring trust, accelerating transition
Globally, the world is not on track to triple renewable capacity by 2030 – as agreed at COP28 – and fossil fuel emissions remain stubbornly high. Unless the renewable transition becomes fairer, it will also become slower.
From rooftop-solar schemes in India that cut bills and spare land, to initiatives in the Philippines, where a coalition of civil society, faith-based and industry groups has launched a “Ten Million Solar Rooftops” challenge, examples are emerging across the world of what fair, people-centred renewables can look like.
In Canada and Australia, projects led by communities or Indigenous people are showing the same spirit. In Western Australia, the Aalga Goorlil “Sun Turtle” Community Power Project – led by the Djarindjin Aboriginal Corporation – aims to reduce the community’s reliance on non-renewable energy and has already become a symbol of self-determination since the community’s official recognition last year. In Bolivia, solar power is strengthening food and economic security for local farming and fishing communities.
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A global just transition mechanism could scale up such efforts, restoring trust and placing equity at the centre of decarbonisation and access to quality energy for everyone.
“Justice isn’t an add-on,” says Mohamed Kamal. “It’s the condition for progress. Without it, the transition won’t hold.” As negotiators prepare for COP30, the question is not only how fast the world can build renewables, but who they are built for and how.
The post A just transition for renewables: Why COP30 must put people before power appeared first on Climate Home News.
A just transition for renewables: Why COP30 must put people before power
At Climate Home News, we found this year a pretty depressing one to cover, shaped as it was by Donald Trump’s attacks on climate science and action at home and abroad – and rounded off by the UN declaring global warming will break through the key 1.5C limit the world set itself in 2015.
But it wasn’t all bad. Nobody had decided to follow the US out of the Paris Agreement by the time it turned 10 this month. Anti-climate candidates in Canada and Australia, backed by Trump, lost elections convincingly. And 2025 may also have been the year carbon dioxide emissions fell for the first time.
What’s more, our reporting this year saw results in the real world. After we revealed that Chilean doctors believe pollution from copper mines in the northern hub of Calama is causing autism, campaigners sued state-owned mining company Codelco. The case is ongoing.
One of the lawyers representing the campaigners said “when [Climate Home News] revealed our silent suffering and our fight, we felt we had finally been heard and had entered the national conversation thanks to international media coverage. That was the final push to file the lawsuit.”
If you want to fund more impactful reporting like this in 2026, please subscribe and unlock all of our content for just the price of a coffee per week. Or to keep up with our latest coverage, you can sign up for our free newsletter and follow us on LinkedIn, Instagram, BlueSky and Facebook.
Below are nine of our best stories this year and, if that’s not enough, here’s nine more from 2024.
1. Solar squeeze: US tariffs threaten panel production and jobs in Thailand
In the year of trade wars, Trump extended Biden-era tariffs on solar panels from China to neighbouring countries. Nicha Wachpanich spoke to some of those workers who subsequently lost their jobs making panels at Chinese-run factories in Thailand and found that the US levies and bad behaviour by bosses had combined to crush their dreams of a better life.
2. Business-as-usual: Donors pour climate adaptation finance into big infrastructure, neglecting local needs
Trump being Trump, and axing US climate finance, is no reason to let other wealthy donor nations off the hook. We examined the latest spreadsheets for annual adaptation aid and found Japan is counting support for massive infrastructure projects in its figures, despite them having only a dubious role in helping people adapt to climate change.
Our reporter Tanbirul Miraj Ripon visited one such project – the Matarbari port in Bangladesh. He found that the port handles coal and gas imports and has destroyed locals’ homes and livelihoods. Despite this, on paper it represents $363 million in Japanese climate adaptation finance, the biggest single climate resilience project being funded by a wealthy country in 2023.
3. Ethiopia’s bold EV ambitions hit bumps in rural areas
Other nations are trying hard to go green but finding it tricky. This year, Ethiopia hosted the Africa Climate Summit, was selected as the host of COP32 and opened the continent’s biggest hydropower dam.
It plans to use some of this clean power to charge electric vehicles, after banning imports of cars with internal combustion engines (even as the European Union is softening its own 2035 ban on ICEs). While that will reduce Ethiopia’s already tiny emissions and its fossil fuel import bills, it won’t be easy in a nation where only half the population has electricity access, as Solomon Yimer and Vivian Chime reported.
4. Ending poverty and gangs: How Zambia seeks to cash in on the global drive for EVs
Other African governments are trying to cash in on their minerals, which big players like China, the US and increasingly Saudi Arabia want for green technologies and/or making equipment for wars.
Pamela Kapekele went to look at the situation in Zambia’s Copperbelt province – where you can probably guess what they produce! She found that good tax regulations and working conditions will be needed if locals are to see the benefits of surging demand for the metal.
Later in the year, an acid spill from a copper-mine tailings dam that contaminated the country’s main river showed the value of environmental regulation too. Reporting from Nigeria’s lithium and South Africa’s platinum mines also highlighted the challenges of making minerals mining and processing cleaner and fairer for communities.
5. Is the world’s big idea for greener air travel a flight of fancy?
Some sectors – like international aviation and shipping – tend to fall outside the scope of national media, and it’s a gap we’ve aimed to fill. Together with Singapore’s Straits Times, we tracked the supply chain for what the airline industry calls “Sustainable Aviation Fuel” (SAF) and found that virgin and barely used palm oil – which threatens rainforests – is being passed off as waste cooking oil and used to power planes in Europe.
Malaysia is a particular hotspot for this fraud, as government subsidies there make virgin palm oil cheap in the shops – and it can be sold for a higher price as “used” cooking oil, providing a profit motive for flipping it. Our investigation was picked up by the Financial Times, Bloomberg and the Malaysian authorities, who have since launched a crackdown on this kind of fraud.
But with verification of the materials used for SAF relying on just a handful of commercial auditors conducting mainly paper-based checks, airlines currently cannot know for sure if their green jet fuel is actually sustainable. Their advertising to passengers should – but often doesn’t – reflect this uncertainty.
6. Brazil’s environment minister suggests roadmap to end fossil fuels at COP30
Our reporting was often prescient this year. We called it correctly that the US would leave the Paris Agreement but not the UNFCCC, that Argentina would not follow America out of Paris, that Ethiopia rather than Nigeria would be chosen as COP32 host and that petrostates would try to kill a new green shipping framework at the International Maritime Organization.
We are also pretty sure we were the first – at least in English – to pick up on Brazilian Environment Minister Marina Silva’s proposal for COP30 to agree on a roadmap away from fossil fuels, which she aired back in June at London Climate Week. That proposal was pushed by President Lula at the start of COP30, dominated much of the conversation at the summit and will continue to be discussed throughout 2026.
8. PR firm working for Shell wins COP30 media contract
In the summer of 2025, our crack investigative reporter Matteo Civillini got the scoop on how the Brazilian government, via a contract tendered by the UN, was working with Edelman on international media relations for the COP30 climate summit while the global PR giant was simultaneously engaged in promoting Shell’s fossil fuel interests in Brazil.
This story was picked up by a range of other media, and amplified calls for agencies whose clients include fossil fuel firms to be excluded from the climate negotiations. Advocacy group Clean Creatives was inspired by Matteo’s reporting to launch a campaign against Edelman’s COP involvement. That culminated in an open letter from influencers and creators with a combined audience of over 24 million calling for Edelman to be dropped. The drumbeat on this theme is likely to get louder in 2026.
8. “House of cards”: Verra used junk carbon credits to fix Shell’s offsetting scandal
And talking of smoke and mirrors, just when we thought the murky web of carbon offsetting linking oil and gas major Shell to sham rice-farming projects in China couldn’t get any more convoluted, it did exactly that.
By combing through the records of carbon-credit registry Verra – the world’s biggest – Matteo confirmed that nearly a million bogus offsets from 10 disqualified methane reduction projects had been compensated for with the same number of junk credits from another four such projects that were also axed by Verra.
“It’s frankly unbelievable that Verra considers it appropriate to compensate for hot air credits with other hot air credits,” Jonathan Crook, policy lead at Carbon Market Watch, told us. “To pretend this is a satisfactory resolution is both absurd and deeply alarming.”
Verra insists the replacement credits were technically available to plug the gap left by the first batch – even though the second set, too, now need to be swapped out. Shell is keeping its distance, saying it does not manage or operate “the projects in question” despite being earlier involved in the Chinese rice-farming programmes as their “authorised representative”. Mind-boggling indeed!
9. Self-taught mechanics give second life to Jordan’s glut of spent EV batteries
In what was on balance a bad year, we brought you some hope too. A landmark advisory opinion on climate change and human rights from the International Court of Justice in The Hague was stronger than anyone imagined and may open the door to lawsuits against polluting countries and companies in 2026.
Other good news stories included analysts suggesting China’s fossil fuel use could peak this year, the UN’s loss and damage fund launching its first call for proposals, South Korea and Morocco moving to phase out coal and a boom in imports of solar panels to Africa.
Hope came too from ordinary people and their ingenuity – like the untrained Jordanians interviewed by Yamuna Matheswaran, hooking up solar panels to old Tesla batteries, lowering both their electricity bills and their carbon emissions into the bargain.
The post Nine of our best climate stories from 2025 appeared first on Climate Home News.
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