South Asian migrant workers building renewable energy projects in Saudi Arabia face exploitation and labour abuses, including excessive hours, high recruitment fees and average monthly salaries of just $370, a report published by a global rights organisation showed on Thursday.
Saudi Arabia, the world’s biggest crude oil exporter, is investing heavily to become a major player in the global clean energy transition and hit net zero by 2060, seeking to reduce its economic dependence on oil as the world shifts away from fossil fuels.
But as the kingdom races to transform its economy with solar and green hydrogen projects, the migrants building them are exposed to abusive hiring practices, low pay, excessive working hours, unsafe conditions and have no way to seek redress, according to the report by the London-headquartered Business & Human Rights Resource Centre (BHRRC).
The researchers interviewed 31 Nepali and three Bangladeshi workers from nine renewables projects, including solar farms and the NEOM Green Hydrogen Project. They found more than half of the workers had been subjected to forced labour.
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Saudi Arabia, home to millions of foreign workers, has long been criticised over its rights record for migrant labourers. Trade unions are banned, there is no minimum wage for migrants and the kingdom still enforces the “kafala” system of foreign labourer sponsorship.
A study by another rights group last year found similar labour violations involving migrants working on renewables projects in the United Arab Emirates.
“Saudi Arabia feels like a jail. We’re like prisoners … They brought us here and dumped us in the desert,” a Nepali worker on the Al Kahfah Solar PV Plant told BHRRC, which said the workers’ vulnerability was exacerbated by the isolated desert locations of many of the energy transition developments and project-by-project hiring by sub-contractors.
Saudi Arabia’s ACWA Power, the solar project’s developer, did not reply to the researchers’ requests for comment.
‘Alarming’ heat exposure
All of the workers interviewed were charged non-refundable recruitment fees averaging $1,600. Salaries as low as $250 per month in some instances pushed many of the migrants to work extra hours to send money home – many recounting seven-day weeks.
More than half of them reported suffering wage theft, such as deductions for taking breaks – despite often working in blistering heat above 50 degrees Celsius.
“One of the most alarming patterns of abuse was heat exposure,” said Catriona Fraser, the report’s lead researcher, adding that the abuses they had identified appeared to be “systemic and exacerbated by the structure of the industry”.
They suffered heat-related illness, including fainting, nosebleeds and – in one case – a suspected heart attack that led to death at NEOM Green Hydrogen Project, the report said.
On a few occasions, workers staged protests – which are banned in Saudi Arabia – to denounce their conditions, including at the Sudair Solar PV plant. But Fraser said protesters had been punished, with several dismissed and deported.
Neither of those two projects responded to requests for comment by the report’s authors.
‘Voices must be surfaced, not silenced’
Fraser said the researchers’ findings should increase scrutiny of the kingdom’s efforts to become a major player in global clean energy supply chains, including exporting renewable power to Europe.
“In its bid to host the 2034 FIFA Men’s Football World Cup, the country spotlights its NEOM host-city and the green hydrogen plant where we identified abuse, yet makes no mention of the migrants whose labour is helping power the transition. Their voices must be surfaced, not silenced,” she said.
Rights campaigners have criticised the decision to hold the World Cup in Saudi Arabia due to labour practices including the “kafala” system, which binds workers to their employers, despite 2021 reforms that allowed some migrant workers to leave the country without permission.
Saudi Arabia’s Human Resources and Social Development Ministry did not respond to a request for comment by Climate Home News. The kingdom has previously rejected criticism of its human rights record.
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BHRRC said several global investors were helping to finance the projects at which it identified labour abuses, including Standard Chartered, HSBC and JPMorgan Chase.
Asked to comment by BHRRC, HSBC said “we follow a clear set of sustainability risk policies which guide our approach to financing and include human rights considerations”.
Standard Chartered told the researchers it could not comment on specific cases but outlined its processes for evaluating environmental and social (E&S) risks when providing financial services to clients.
JPMorgan Chase did not respond to their request for comment.
Fraser urged all the companies involved in the projects identified in the research to “commit to investigating these violations”.
“[The rollout] of renewables must be fast, but not at the expense of the human rights of workers and communities,” the report said.
Main image: A view of the cityscape in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia (Photo: REUTERS/Mohammed Benmansour)
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https://www.climatechangenews.com/2025/10/02/migrant-workers-building-saudi-arabias-green-future-face-abuses-and-exploitation-report-finds/
SYDNEY, Thursday 30 October 2026 — In response to reports that the Albanese government is set to introduce draft legislation this year that would seek to ban data centres in Australia’s suburbs, Joe Rafalowicz, Head of Climate and Energy at Greenpeace Australia Pacific, said:
“These reports are a testament to the growing community opposition to these completely inappropriate AI factories that have sprung up across our suburbs, and Big Tech corporations should take heed — the data centre build-out must not happen without the endorsement of the Australian people.
“But the government can’t simply ship this problem out to regional Australia without addressing the fundamental issues with this extractive new industry.
“We’re already seeing a trend of AI data centre proposals moving to the regions, in areas that are more water-scarce, more environmentally sensitive, and next to sources of fracked and coal seam gas to support their massive BYO gas-fired power plans — a pattern we’ve seen play out in the United States.
“From the Beetaloo Basin in the NT to the Western Downs in Qld, we’re seeing a wave of AI data centre proposals that would see new gas fast-tracked to support their massive energy demand, and threaten to completely derail Australia’s energy transition.
“Just as suburban Australians are asking, “what for?”, regional communities like Berry Springs and Dalby do not want dirty data centres setting up shop with absolutely no benefit to their communities. Greenpeace is calling for a moratorium on AI data centre developments until strict and enforceable safeguards are in place to protect our climate and our communities.”
-ENDS-
Media contact
Kate O’Callaghan on +61 406 231 892 or kate.ocallaghan@greenpeace.org
AI data centre ban in suburbs would not address fundamental issues: Greenpeace
In the thick of the COP29 climate summit in Azerbaijan in 2024, the UN climate talks were rattled by what can only be described as a major PR disaster. The BBC, Reuters and The Guardian all carried headlines, attributed to leading climate policy experts, that the COPs were “no longer fit for purpose”.
The articles outlined a series of reforms called for in an open letter signed by 22 eminent scientists and politicians, including a former UN secretary-general and previous UN climate chief, with a further 150 lending their support. The headlines shook confidence in the COP process, just as governments were wrestling over a new climate finance goal.
The Club of Rome – which handled the media relations for the letter – hurried to say that its “constructive, supportive ideas” had been “misinterpreted”. Negotiators kept calm(ish) and carried on, in the end landing the finance goal after some high-stakes drama on the final day.
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To my surprise, when I went back this week to read the letter again, I could not find the offending line about the COPs not being fit for purpose. The Club of Rome has yet to respond to my query about its disappearance.
Whatever happened to the wording, that sentiment has been widely shared. COPs have ballooned in size while the importance of their outcomes seems to have diminished since the 2015 Paris Agreement (with the exception of the 2023 COP in Dubai where countries agreed to transition away from fossil fuels in energy systems).
The same on the surface
Two years on from those painful headlines in Baku, has anything changed for the better? You might be forgiven for thinking not. Official decisions are still made by consensus rather than the majority voting some have called for to stop blockers.
Tens of thousands of officials, activists and business execs still scurry around the halls to an ever-growing list of side events, roundtables and dialogues, while deals still come down to rows, all-nighters and jargon-filled texts adopted to rounds of applause.
But it would not be true to say that COPs have completely failed to respond to the very real need to translate the words of the Paris Agreement into action in the outside world.
Global warming is projected to be around 1.3C lower this century than it would have been if the world had not committed to tackle the climate crisis under that accord. Developing countries have a valued space at COPs in which their voices have equal weight in decision-making, unlike in many other international fora. And most importantly, perhaps, there has been a subtle shift, tipping the balance away from negotiating towards doing.
Brazil branded last year’s summit in Belém as the “COP of Implementation”, corralling the sprawling Action Agenda into six axes. This was a bid to impose some structure on the mushrooming efforts between governments, UN agencies, cities, businesses and civil society to set targets and spur faster results on their pet issues, from methane emissions to health and adaptation in conflict zones. COP30 alone saw the launch of 120 “plans to accelerate solutions”.
COP30 roadmaps off the cuff
Meanwhile, as the formal negotiations drew to a close, it was clear that consensus decision-making was evolving into something a little more improvised.
With only around half of all countries on board with the idea of a roadmap to transition away from fossil fuels, COP30 President André Corrêa do Lago announced his team would put one together over the coming year, along with another on how to meet a global goal to halt deforestation by 2030. Those roadmaps will be launched next week, presented and discussed at COP31, though it’s still unclear whether or how they’ll be incorporated into the formal negotiating agenda.
Some leading policy-makers don’t think that matters too much. Speaking to journalists before the Antalya summit, COP30 CEO Ana Toni and Dutch climate minister Stientje van Veldhoven said “coalitions of the willing” can move ahead without needing consensus from the COPs. This, they said, was evident this year at the first global conference on TAFF, co-chaired by van Veldhoven and attended by 60 countries.
“Consensus or no-consensus in the general COP doesn’t make a difference for the choices I have to make in my country to get my country to phase out fossil fuels,” said the Dutch minister. The Netherlands recently became one of the first to publish a national TAFF plan.
COP31 banks on flagship voluntary initiatives
This thinking has permeated the management and expected outcomes of this year’s COP too. Earlier this year, Türkiye, supported by international energy agencies, floated the idea of a voluntary goal to boost electrification to 35% of the world’s final energy consumption by 2035 – and this is now being touted as one of the main results to be expected from Antalya.
Türkiye is also championing a pledge on AI and climate, while co-host Australia is pushing to ease access to climate finance for least developed countries and small island states.
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None of these needs consensus. But with a political cover decision already in the works, as trailed by the COP presidents, they – and perhaps the fossil fuel roadmap – may find a home in the official text if language acceptable to most can be found, giving them them additional weight.
UNFCCC reform process in the shadows
Formal reform is underway too, if quietly. UN climate chief Simon Stiell is leading a review informed by ongoing consultations with a group of 15 well-respected climate policy experts, three of whom signed the open letter in 2024.
Among them is leading Swedish climate and sustainability scientist Johan Rockström who has strong ideas about how to make COPs function better, including a switch to majority voting. He told the same press briefing nothing stands in the way of this, because the rules of procedure for making decisions at COPs have never been formally agreed.
Still, to get away from the default setting of consensus would require agreement on a new system that may be impossible to achieve given the rise in bullying tactics by fossil fuel heavyweights.
Comment: The UN climate process was built for negotiation – now it must support implementation
The deliberations with the high-level policy gurus, as reflected in a summary of June’s session in Bonn, largely echo what’s already happening organically, calling for stronger partnerships and accountability both in and between the Action Agenda and negotiations. It doesn’t mention voting.
A general overview of the reform exercise says that “improving and optimizing the [UN climate] process over the medium to long term… will be critical to fostering trust, enhancing collaboration, and catalyzing increased ambition”.
In the short term, don’t hold your breath for anything concrete on reform at COP31 but watch for signs in what ends up dominating the headlines from Türkiye.
The post Editor’s Desk: COP reform is happening quietly, behind the headlines appeared first on Climate Home News.
Editor’s Desk: COP reform is happening quietly, behind the headlines