In contrast to COP30’s disappointing outcomes on finance, adaptation and fossil fuel transition, governments in Belém agreed to an ambitious Just Transition package. It combines the strongest language on rights and inclusion yet seen in the UN climate process with a new global mechanism to support countries reshaping their economies in a cleaner and fairer way.
Delegates described the win as a rare convergence of political will, technical facilitation and years of groundwork by civil society.
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“This decision brings the highest level of commitment we’ve ever seen on rights, inclusion and cooperation in climate planning,” said Anabella Rosemberg, Just Transition lead at Climate Action Network International.
“In a COP where many other rooms were struggling, this shows what is possible when the people who have been carrying Just Transition for years finally get heard.”
Civil society kept the issue alive
The work programme on Just Transition, launched in 2022, remained low-profile across several COP cycles. During that time, unions, youth networks, feminist groups, Indigenous advocates and NGOs continued refining their proposals and pushing negotiators even when political attention was limited.
As momentum built toward COP30 this year, these groups began referring to their proposal as the Belém Action Mechanism – the “BAM” – signalling the level of institutional ambition they believed the process required. “There would be no Just Transition mechanism without civil society,” Rosemberg said.
She noted how different groups kept the issue alive over the past three years – drafting text, feeding ideas into consultations, and staging actions – from June’s ‘picketnic’ in Bonn to demonstrations in Belém.
“The strongest rights and inclusion language ever agreed at a COP comes directly from that sustained work,” she added.
Governments shifted faster than expected
A key moment arrived on day two of COP30, when the G77+China group of developing countries signalled its support for establishing a Just Transition mechanism. Negotiators from several regions described this as the turning point that made an ambitious outcome possible.
This was followed by the EU at the end of the first week and then by the UK. Behind the scenes, civil society groups in Canada, Australia and Switzerland pushed their governments to align with the emerging consensus.
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Facilitators and ministers closed the gaps
The technical co-facilitators of talks on the Just Transition Work Programme, Joseph Teo (of Singapore) and Federica Fricano (Italy), were credited with producing a clear, workable draft text that helped bridge divides. Delegates said its readability – unusual for UNFCCC text – helped maintain trust.
Last year at COP29 in Baku, the Just Transition track of the negotiations ended without an outcome, partly because no ministers were mandated to land one.
Belém took a different approach: Mexico’s Alicia Bárcena and Poland’s Krzysztof Bolesta were appointed as ministerial leads and played a central role in balancing strong rights language with the institutional detail needed to implement it.
UNFCCC secretariat staff supported the process with rapid revision work through the second week.
Brazil’s presidency and the significance of place
As the COP host nation, Brazil made Just Transition one of its three priorities, ensuring the track remained visible amid wider disputes. The presidency directed parties toward “institutional arrangements” – the diplomatic route that made a mechanism possible.
Belém’s context also mattered. The region is a long-standing focal point for debates around livelihoods, extractivism of natural resources and environmental protection, grounding the negotiations in a real-world context.
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“Brazil was the right place for this breakthrough,” Rosemberg said. “Here the tension between social protection and environmental protection is lived, not abstract. A mechanism agreed in the land of trade unionist and environmentalist Chico Mendes – that means something.”
What the Just Transition decision changes
The final text approved at COP30 sets out principles for rights-based, inclusive transitions and decides to develop a global mechanism to support countries in implementing those principles – elevating it to a structural component of how climate action will be delivered in the Paris Agreement era. The mechanism is due to be operationalised at COP31 next November.
The COP30 agreement also reinforces the expectation that social and economic dimensions must be central to national climate plans, not appended to them.
The work starts now
The mechanism’s impact will depend on the operational details agreed by governments in the months ahead. Key questions include the design of the mechanism’s committee, what form secretariat support will take, and whether civil society and trade unions will have a formal role in its work.
Parties also need to decide whether the mechanism should help convene a wider network of practitioners. Its first workplan, the identification of support needs, and clarification of how it will interact with existing UNFCCC bodies will shape how effective it becomes – decisions that are expected to be taken at COP31.
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“What comes next is making sure this mechanism speaks to reality,” Rosemberg said.
“It has to work for workers facing job loss, for communities left out of climate decisions, and for governments trying to shift economies away from extractivism. If those voices shape it, this can be an eye-opener rather than a repetition of old conversations.”
Social justice at the forefront
COP30 will likely be remembered for its unresolved debates and for outcomes that fell short in areas many countries consider essential. Against that backdrop, the Just Transition decision stands out as a rare instance of coordination between civil society, governments and the presidency.
It marks the first time the UN climate process has created an institutional structure dedicated to ensuring that social and economic justice is embedded in the shift away from fossil fuels and other high-carbon sectors that must change.
The Just Transition outcome may not resolve the broader challenges faced by the UN climate process, but it establishes a foundation that many negotiators and observers say could shape climate policy for the better in the years to come.
The post How Belém built a new Just Transition mechanism appeared first on Climate Home News.
https://www.climatechangenews.com/2025/11/27/how-belem-built-a-new-just-transition-mechanism/
The country’s most valuable utility didn’t like offshore wind. But a proposed merger with Dominion would include a $11.4 billion project in Coastal Virginia.
A utility megamerger announced this week would mean that the largest offshore wind project in the United States would be owned by the same company that already is the nation’s leading developer of renewables and battery storage.
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Australia’s new environmental standards are supposed to protect wildlife. Right now, they don’t.
We have one of the worst mammal extinction rates in the world. We’ve already lost 39 species, including the Christmas Island Shrew and the desert rat-kangaroo, while iconic species like the Hairy-Nosed Wombat, Pygmy blue whale and Swift Parrot continue to slide towards extinction. Forests are still being bulldozed at an alarming rate. Rivers and reefs are under serious pressure.
Fixing this sorry state of affairs was why the Federal Government promised to fix Australia’s broken national nature laws—a promise that culminated in the nature law reforms passed late last year.
A big part of these reforms is the creation of new “National Environmental Standards” — rules intended to guide decisions on projects that could damage nature.
But the Government’s latest draft standards—open for consultation until May 29th—fall dangerously short.
Instead of setting clear environmental guardrails, the draft rules risk making it easier for damaging projects to get approved, while nature continues to decline. Legal experts are warning that unless the standards are changed, they could weaken protections rather than strengthen them.
So what are these standards, exactly?
The new standards are a centrepiece of major reforms to the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act (EPBC Act), which were passed late last year and are designed to fix a broken environmental regulatory system. They are meant to set clear rules for what environmental protection should actually look like.
In simple terms, they’re supposed to answer questions like:
- What measures should developers be made to put in place to protect threatened species?
- How do we ensure the most important habitats and natural places are not hacked away, “death-by-a-thousand-cuts”-style, from ongoing development proposals?
- When should a project simply not go ahead?
- What rules should states follow if they’re in charge of assessing development projects?
- How do we make sure nature is actually improving, not just declining more slowly?
If designed and implemented properly, these standards could become the backbone of strong, effective reformed nature laws.
But right now, they leave huge loopholes open.
The biggest problem: process over outcomes
The biggest problem with the draft standards is that they focus too heavily on whether companies follow a process—not whether nature is genuinely protected in the end. That might sound technical, but it has real-world consequences.
Imagine a company wants to clear critical habitat for a threatened species. Under a strong system, the key question should be: Will this project cause unacceptable or significant environmental harm?
But under the current draft standards, if the company follows the required steps and paperwork, the project could still be considered acceptable — even if the damage to nature is clear.
This is deeply ineffective. Destruction that checks bureaucratic check-boxes is still destruction. The standards should enforce the protection of nature—not just the ticking of procedural boxes.
A smaller definition of habitat could leave wildlife exposed
Another alarming change in the draft standards is the narrowing of how “habitat” is defined, which could have serious consequences for wildlife protection.
Habitat is more than just the exact spot where an animal is seen sleeping, nesting or feeding today; we need to think more holistically about habitat as a connected network of ecosystems that species may rely on to survive, including breeding grounds, migration corridors, areas used during drought or fire, and places they may need to move to as the climate changes.
But the draft standards effectively shrink the areas considered important enough to protect by defining habitat as only very small areas that if destroyed would certainly send the species extinct, rather than habitat which maintains and restores healthy populations able to thrive well into the future.
For animals already under pressure from habitat destruction and climate change, protecting only the bare minimum is a dangerous approach. In practice, that could mean that places which are essential for threatened species to recover and survive long term are destroyed just because they are not classified under the standards as ‘habitat’—a lose-lose outcome for biodiversity and the Australian government’s nature protection goals.
Offsets are still doing too much heavy lifting
Australians have heard the promise before: “Yes, this area will be damaged — but it’ll be offset somewhere else.” In practice, environmental offsets have severely failed to replace what was lost.
You can’t instantly recreate a centuries-old forest. You can’t quickly rebuild complex wildlife habitat. And some ecosystems simply cannot be replaced once destroyed. Yet the draft standards still rely heavily on offsets rather than prioritising avoiding harm in the first place.
The standards must reduce their reliance on offsets, and instead prioritise actual habitat protection. Because once extinction happens, there’s no offset for it.
Australia cannot afford another backwards step on nature
The Albanese Government came to office promising to end Australia’s extinction crisis and repair national nature laws. But this will be a broken promise if the huge loopholes in the National Environmental Standards aren’t addressed.
Right now, Australia is losing wildlife and ecosystems faster than they can recover. Scientists have warned for years that incremental change is no longer enough.
Strong standards could help turn things around by:
- stopping destruction in critical habitat,
- setting firm limits on environmental harm,
- requiring genuine recovery for nature,
- and making decision-makers accountable for real outcomes rather than process.
If the Government locks in rules that prioritise process over protection, Australia risks entrenching the very system that caused the crisis in the first place.
What needs to change?
The Government still has time to fix the draft standards before they are finalised over the next month.
Greenpeace Australia Pacific is calling on the government to:
- ensure decisions are based on outcomes, not just process
- ensure that all important habitat is protected, not just narrow areas
- ensuring that death-by-a-thousand-cuts is avoided by considering the “cumulative impacts” of multiple projects in a region
- ensuring offsets are only used as an absolute last resort
Australians were promised stronger nature laws—not more loopholes. Australia’s wildlife cannot afford another missed opportunity.You can help ensure the Federal Government’s final standards put to parliament are as strong as possible by putting in a quick submission here.
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