Trade unionists and climate justice advocates seeking a fair deal for workers whose jobs will be affected by the transition away from planet-heating fossil fuels are placing their hopes in next year’s UN climate conference in Brazil following a disappointing outcome at COP29 in Azerbaijan last month.
From coal mines and oil refineries to car factories and construction, the global shift to cleaner sources of energy will alter the nature of employment, leading to job losses in some sectors and creation in others, opportunities and risks in clean technology supply chains, and new threats and benefits for the communities where the changes are happening.
In a bid to share the pain and gain more equally, governments at the 2022 COP27 climate summit in Egypt launched a “Just Transition Work Programme” (JTWP). But so far it has delivered little – and talks on how the programme should proceed in practice ended without agreement at COP29.
The Azerbaijan presidency running the talks instead focused on landing a new deal on climate finance for developing countries, and governments ended up delaying further discussions on the JWTP until the mid-year climate talks next June in Bonn and COP30 in Belém.
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Bert De Wel, global climate policy coordinator at the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC), tagged this year’s Baku summit a “wasted COP” in terms of implementing the JTWP. He said just transition was not given the attention it deserves, noting that the interests of workers are often “kicked out or minimalised” at UN talks. “When there is reference to rights, they tend to leave out labour rights. We want to be mentioned too,” he added.
But others said no deal on just transition at COP29 was better than a bad deal.
Kenya’s Fatuma Hussein, who is the African Group’s lead negotiator on just transition, said she preferred the option of having “no outcome” than “putting the process at risk”. She told Climate Home that developed countries in Baku had avoided discussing finance, international cooperation and adaptation to climate impacts in the context of a just transition – and this was “the biggest problem”.
Telling developing nations, including those in Africa, that they must work towards just transition on their own would be “missing the point” and not delivering on the goals of the 2015 Paris Agreement, she added.
Right to develop
According to the International Labour Organization (ILO), climate change and extreme weather conditions affect 70% of the world’s economic sectors, with rising global temperatures and environmental risks harming businesses and workers through damage to property and productivity. It estimates that transitioning from fossil fuels to renewable energy would lead to about 6 million job losses but would in turn create around 24 million new jobs by 2030.
Under the ILO’s guidelines for a just transition to a low-carbon, climate-resilient world, the organisation calls for economic, environmental and social policies, as well as education and training, to help companies, workers, investors and consumers play a proactive role.
Climate campaigners and labour rights activists had looked – in vain – to COP29 to agree a work plan for governments to help them take the concrete steps needed.
According to the ITUC’s De Wel, the outcomes they were hoping for included provision of finance to implement national-level efforts to secure a just transition and guidance on preparing new national climate plans based on consultation with workers’ representatives and trade unions. Support is also required to put in place social protection systems for workers who might lose their jobs, as well as defining what the energy transition will mean for the future of employment and industrial development within countries.
“Systematising these things and taking lessons out of it for the whole group of countries – that’s what we want and recommend,” he said.
De Wel called for a broad global view of just transition that is not narrowly focused on Polish or German coal miners, for example, “without taking into account the robbery of minerals and materials from Africa” or denying the right of countries in the Global South “to have industrial development”.
Activists call for end to fossil fuels, payment by polluters and a just transition for workers, at the COP29 climate summit in Azerbaijan, November 16, 2024. (Photo: Climate Home News/Megan Rowling)
Amos Wemanya, a campaigner with Greenpeace Africa, said Africa’s colonial history continues to pose development and economic challenges that fuel indebtedness and keep the continent mainly as a provider of raw materials to the rest of the world and a dumping ground for low-value-added products.
Wemanya said current global trade policies and finance flows worsen the structural socioeconomic and technological inequalities between developed and developing countries and should be addressed by the UN’s Just Transition Work Programme.
At the local level, Gvantsa Gverdtsiteli, research and policy coordinator for climate governance with Transparency International, said communities needed to own and benefit directly from transition projects, such as renewable energy power facilities, in their area.
Attention should be paid to ensuring that “their economic status is changing, that they get better opportunities and better living conditions, and their socioeconomic environment improves”, she added.
Early action needed from Brazil
Climate justice advocates say that the JTWP must deliver on its mandate of leaving no one behind as the world consumes less fossil fuel and more clean energy, while ensuring fair collaboration in global efforts to address the challenges posed by the transition. Under the Paris Agreement, governments committed to take into account “the imperatives of a just transition of the workforce and the creation of decent work and quality jobs in accordance with nationally defined development priorities”.
De Wel said the JTWP offers an avenue to discuss these issues more deeply at COP30 and in the coming years, as the green transition picks up pace. He said he hoped the Brazilian presidency of next year’s climate summit would give the JTWP “more centre space in the negotiations” and put it “much higher on the agenda” than at COP29, where workers’ rights and concerns got little prominence.
“We want a voice at the table and we want to be respected,” De Wel said, outlining expectations that Brazil will take the social impacts of the energy transition on workers and their communities seriously and ensure they are reflected in the decisions taken at COP30 on its soil.
Gverdtsiteli of Transparency International said COP30 should give priority to “strong governance, transparency, accountability and integrity in the transition initiatives” that will be implemented, to prevent corruption and make them accountable to the people affected.
Anabella Rosemberg, senior strategist on just transition and climate justice at Climate Action Network International, said she hoped governments would “heal and redress” the failure on just transition at COP29 with a fresh approach to moving the conversation forward. She emphasised that Brazil would need to play an active role in convening informal discussions among governments before the Bonn talks to pave the way for effective decisions at COP30 in November.
Greenpeace Africa’s Wemanya said work on just transition at COP30 should advance ideas on the social, economic and environmental aspects of sustainable development, as well as eradicating poverty, boosting food and energy security, and protecting fragile ecosystems.
“COP30 must lead to just transition outcomes that take into consideration domestic and local realities to ensure well-being and safeguard the rights of communities and people,” he added.
(Reporting by Vivian Chime; editing by Megan Rowling)
The post After Baku setback, activists call for ‘just transition’ to be front and centre at COP30 appeared first on Climate Home News.
After Baku setback, activists call for ‘just transition’ to be front and centre at COP30
After witnessing the effects of sea-level rise in the low-lying island nation of Tuvalu, Pacific leaders on Tuesday used the pre-COP31 summit in Fiji to voice their frustration at the difficulties they have experienced in tapping the global climate finance system.
A small group of government leaders, climate negotiators and heads of development banks and climate funds took a trip to Tuvalu’s Funafuti atoll on Tuesday morning, travelling by road over land just 10-20 metres wide to visit a project that is building barriers to keep the sea from the land.
They then flew to Fiji for the pre-COP summit, where several Pacific leaders said they had been let down by the insufficient quantity, bad terms and slow speed of international finance to help them adapt to a warming climate that is bringing higher oceans, drought and more powerful storms to their shores.
“Right now, our islands are like a canoe that has been rammed by a massive foreign ship. Our canoe is taking on water, we are sinking, and what is the world’s response?” asked Palau’s President Surangel Whipps Jr.
“They hand us a tiny patch to cover a gaping hole,” he continued, “but the bureaucratic process just to receive that patch is so slow that the water fills the hole while we wait. Then to rebuild the vessel so that we can survive the next storm, we are offered loans, debt that adds weight to a sinking boat packaged in red tape so thick we can barely access it. And while we wait, the water continues to fill.”
Pacific leaders and Australia called again on governments to invest in the new Pacific Resilience Facility (PRF), which has been designed by the Pacific Islands Forum and is seeking $500 million in investments by COP31 in November.
It has around $180 million so far, but did not receive additional pledges during the UN General Assembly in New York. The PRF aims to invest to generate annual returns which it can give to projects like water tanks for drought-hit communities.
Witnessing sea level rise
The annual pre-COP gathering is usually a low-profile technical meeting of climate negotiators. But this year, Australia – which is the president of negotiations at COP31 – partnered with the Pacific to introduce a “leaders segment” in an attempt to shine a spotlight on climate issues affecting the region.
Fourteen government leaders – from Australia, Timor-Leste, Mauritius and the Pacific – made the trip. They were joined by the European Union’s climate commissioner Wopke Hoekstra, the heads of the Green Climate Fund and the Asian Development Bank and former Australian prime minister Julia Gillard.
On their return to Fiji, Solomon Islands Prime Minister Matthew Wale told the pre-COP leaders roundtable that the sea level rise they had witnessed was personal for him.
“Tuvalu was not just a site visit for me. I saw the story of my own saltwater people,” he said, adding that he, his daughter and his grandfather had lost their houses to sea level rise and that three-quarters of his electorate live on land that will be underwater in the next 30 years.
From the other side of the world, Antigua and Barbuda’s environment minister Michael Joseph said Tuvalu’s problems felt similar to those of his own Caribbean islands. “I saw vulnerable communities… just metres from the sea and people determined to remain on their land, preserve their culture and way of life,” he said.
A group of Fijian schoolchildren told the leaders it was not just sea level rise the Pacific struggles with but also heatwaves, droughts and storms, which worry their families and prevent them from learning.
Climate finance red-tape
Several Pacific leaders criticised the world’s leaders for not doing enough to combat climate change. Cook Islands Prime Minister Mark Brown expressed disappointment that only two non-Pacific leaders had come to the pre-COP, a fact Australian media widely picked up on to label the event a flop and question its A$20 million (US$14m) price tag.
“We’ve heard a lot of numbers these last two days,” Brown said. “Let me share one of my own. More than 50 invitations extended to world leaders… to see for themselves what high emissions are doing to our nations and our ocean – an ocean that covers nearly one-third of the Earth’s surface.”
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He called for more climate finance for the Pacific, asking “if the world is prepared to assess our suitability for climate finance, why is it not equally prepared to scrutinise whether those responsible for delivering it are meeting their obligations?”
Like Palau’s president Whipps, Naoero’s President David Adeang criticised the red tape that is hindering access to climate finance as well as a lack of money, complaining especially about “complicated procedures, heavy reporting, delays in approval and disbursement”.
Adeang added that “the way we assess vulnerability matters”, adding that it should be measured by more than income. Naoero, for example, is classified by the World Bank as high-income, restricting which climate finance it is eligible for.
Action plan to improve access
On Thursday, the Australian government will present a statement and action plan on improving access to climate finance for small island developing states and least developed countries, which it is asking other countries and organisations to endorse.
The statement addresses some of these Pacific complaints as well as acknowledging that progress has already been made on simplifying access by multilateral development banks and climate funds.
In Fiji, Asian Development Bank head Masato Kanda said his institution is “tailoring our finance and operations to island realities” because “your children and their children should be able to grow old in the countries their ancestors have called home for millennia”.
The executive director of the Green Climate Fund (GCF), Mafalda Duarte, said that the GCF-backed coastal adaptation project leaders visited in Tuvalu shows that “climate finance works” although – as the project took eight years to implement – “it takes time, and therefore we have no time to waste”.
Australia calls for optimism
While Pacific leaders expressed concern that the world is set to blast past its agreed 1.5C warming limit, endangering their nations, Australia’s Prime Minister Anthony Albanese called for “optimism”. “If people think there is no hope, then they will not strive to get the change that we need,” he said.
He said that when he attended his first COP in 2005, Australia’s renewable energy target was 2%. Its target is now 82% renewable electricity by 2030.
While Albanese promoted Australia’s success at electrifying homes and businesses and rolling out renewables, he has been criticised by climate campaigners for extending the production of fossil fuels, including coal – largely for export.
France’s Minister for Ecological Transition Monique Barbut defended the European Union’s climate action at the pre-COP meeting. She said the continent was heating up and reducing emissions faster and providing more climate finance than anywhere else in the world.
“It is time for all major emitters to step up and do their fair share” on climate finance, she said. Most developing countries with large emissions have fiercely resisted joining the club of climate finance donors, arguing they have played a disproportionately small historic role in causing climate change.
Barbut, as well as Palau’s president Whipps, called for the next flagship scientific assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to be finished by COP33 in 2028, in time to inform the next global stocktake of national climate action.
This timeline has been opposed by countries like India, Saudi Arabia and China, who argue it would put an unfair burden on developing countries. Barbut said countries should “support the work of the IPCC rather than sabotage its calendar”.
Barbut said that governments should agree at COP31 to aim to raise the share of “clean electricity” in final energy consumption to 35% by 2035. The Turkish and Australian governments have pushed for this goal although without specifying that the electricity should be “clean”. Barbut added that COP31 should also agree to cut emissions of methane, a particularly potent greenhouse gas.
The post Pacific leaders rail at climate finance failures after pre-COP trip to Tuvalu appeared first on Climate Home News.
Pacific leaders rail at climate finance failures after pre-COP trip to Tuvalu
Jacynta Fa’amau is a Pacific campaigner at global grassroots climate movement 350.org and a secretariat member of Pacific Climate Warriors.
The first thing that struck me was the sheer size of Queensland’s Saraji coal mine. Standing at the edge of the enormous pit, my brain scrambled for words as I scanned the earth’s open wound – a whole island could probably fit inside it.
Looking down, I noticed footprints of an emu and a koala, pressed and dried in what was once a puddle – signs of how drought had driven animals in desperate search of water, so dangerously close to the coal trucks and heavy machinery ahead.
Earlier this year, I joined a small group of Pacific Islanders on a journey through the Bowen Basin to learn from First Nations communities battling Australia’s mammoth coal industry. Of the more than 40 coal mines operating in the area, BHP & Mitsubishi Alliance’s Saraji mine is one of the largest. So it came as a painful shock to us when in August, the Australian government approved the mine’s extension just months after our visit.
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Witnessing coal extraction is devastating. It is bad enough to see what pillaging tonnes of coal can do to a mine’s immediate surroundings: dry creek beds, dwindling wildlife, denuded land. But to know that this coal will be shipped across the ocean, bring air pollution, and eventually lead to the destruction of Pacific islands thousands of miles away is another kind of heartbreak.
Rising ocean waters
I’m an Australian-born Samoan. In 2002, I visited my family home for the first time. My father took me to the rural community where generations of my family were raised. He did not have the words to describe how much has changed since rising ocean waters had taken away almost a third of the beach.
I learned of how we had to relocate my great‑great‑grandparents’ grave to higher ground twice in the last 15 years. Of how my cousins have to paddle out further to sea to catch fish, since warmer waters have destroyed much of the reef. Of how the ocean crashes so close to my uncle’s home that he had to build a new house further away.
We saw reflections of our own climate destruction in the Pacific when we shared these stories with our First Nations relatives at the edge of the Saraji mine. Murrawah Johnson and Teila Watson, both Birri Gubba and Gangulu women, made clear connections between their struggles and ours. “We don’t get to inherit our land and we don’t get to inherit our traditional roles. We are fighting a war on extinction,” Murrawah said.
Coal extraction devastated their lands and cultures – totems have disappeared, fresh water has become scarce – while the effects of using it have devastated ours. “King tide, cyclones, all the violence that has been enacted on your country and people is because of the violence that has been allowed here, to us and our country,” Teila said.
Wearing the mantle of climate leadership
This week, Australia is assuming the mantle of climate leadership as co-president and head of negotiations of this year’s UN Climate Change Conference, COP31. It will lead on deliberating the summit’s priorities as world leaders and climate negotiators descend on Fiji and Tuvalu for the pre-COP meetings.
Ironically, just days before the pre-COP began, the New South Wales Independent Planning Commission approved the largest-ever coal project the state has seen, set to emit an extra 800 million tonnes of carbon emissions. I joined the Pacific Climate Warriors and other communities in submitting about 4,000 appeals to oppose the project – yet these all fell on deaf ears.