Migrants working on renewable energy projects in the United Arab Emirates say they are the victims of abusive conditions that could amount to forced labour, an investigation by a human rights group has found.
Equidem interviewed 34 migrant workers from South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa employed in the supply chain of 10 major renewable energy developers mostly from Europe and the Gulf States, which operate solar and wind projects in the UAE.
They worked for 14 local subcontracting companies, including renewables specialists such as solar installers and technicians, and firms providing services such as transport, security and cleaning.
Two-thirds of interviewed workers said they experienced wage theft, through unpaid, delayed or irregular wages. Half reported working illegally-long hours and as many said they were charged recruitment fees – a practice widely deemed exploitative because it can lead to debt bondage. It is illegal in the UAE. Some workers also said their passports had been illegally withheld.
Mustafa Qadri, chief executive of UK-based Equidem, told Climate Home News the findings were “shocking” for a “high-tech sector” responsible for “some of the most sought-after investment opportunities in the global market”.
The labour rights advocacy group found violations in breach of UAE labour law and international standards that matched 10 of the 11 International Labour Organization’s indicators of forced labour.
This “create[s] conditions of forced labour for migrant workers in the renewables sector in the UAE,” Equidem concluded in a report released on Tuesday.
Treated ‘like animals’
The Gulf States continue to produce and export high volumes of oil and gas but have seen a rapid rollout of renewable energy infrastructure in recent years, reaching 5.6 gigawatts in 2022 from close to zero a decade earlier. The UAE – which hosted the COP28 climate summit last year – is one of the region’s fastest-growing renewable markets but it has “been rapidly built on the back of exploitation”, Qadri said.
Interviewees reported workplace discrimination, violence and harassment, especially targeted at new workers. One said he was living in overcrowded and unsanitary accommodation with 18 others, while half said their food allowances weren’t enough to meet their needs.
“The company treats all the workers like animals,” Suaid, an Indian worker subcontracted to pack solar equipment for a European renewable energy developer, told Equidem. “I work for 12 hours a day. If I do my work comfortably, the work will not be finished and if the work is not finished, the supervisor will shout at me. Even my salary can be cut. There is so much work that I do not get even a minute’s rest.”
Equidem chose not to identify projects and employers linked to rights violations because of the risk of reprisals for workers. “These workers are facing terrible conditions and suffering in incredible silence,” said Qadri.
The UAE government did not respond to Climate Home’s request for comment.
Double climate impacts
Migrant workers account for a vast proportion of private-sector employment in Gulf countries.
Mass public events such as the 2022 Qatar World Cup and the 2020 Dubai Expo have exposed some of the risks and abuses faced by migrant workers in the region. The Business & Human Rights Resource Centre (BHRRC), which co-authored the report, has recorded 490 allegations of migrant worker abuse across Gulf States since 2022.
But some of the alleged abuse unveiled by Equidem is unique to the renewable energy sector, said Qadri, citing the extent of illegal working hours and workers’ isolation from urban centres while employed at renewable energy projects located in the desert, which also exposes them to heat stress.
Ten workers told Equidem they suffered health impacts after engaging in physical work in extreme temperatures without adequate water and breaks.
“Sometimes I am made to stand more than 10 hours in the scorching sun,” said Akira, a Kenyan worker employed as a security guard for a multinational energy company.
Fractious COP29 lands $300bn climate finance goal, dashing hopes of the poorest
Climate change is expected to make the UAE even hotter and more humid between June and September – a combination that can be deadly.
The interviewed workers originated from developing countries such as Kenya, India and Pakistan, where extreme weather impacts fuelled by climate change, from heatwaves to droughts and floods, are intensifying. Equidem previously found evidence of migrant workers seeking jobs in the UAE after losing their livelihoods to flooding in their home country.
Opaque supply chain
The investigation unmasks a sector characterised by multiple layers of outsourcing, where contractual ties between workers, subcontractors and major renewable energy developers are rarely disclosed.
This “blind spot” increases the risk of abuse, Isobel Archer of BHRRC told Climate Home.
BHRRC reviewed publicly available governance policies of the 27 largest renewable energy developers in the Gulf region, including French companies EDF and TotalEnergies, Chinese firm Jinko Power, the UAE’s state-owned Masdar and Shell.
It found that just 12 companies recognised risks specific to migrant workers and only eight prohibited recruitment charges.
“Given the Gulf region’s record on human rights abuses, companies operating in this field must conduct heightened human-rights due diligence, assess and mitigate the risk their operations pose to migrant workers in their value chains,” said Archer.
“We have to push for a fast transition to renewables. But the so-called creation of green jobs doesn’t give [companies] a free pass to ignore the rights of the most vulnerable in the supply chain,” she added.
BHRRC contacted all 27 companies about its findings. At the time of publication, Masdar was the only company to respond. It said it was “deeply committed to safeguarding the rights and wellbeing of all individuals, including migrant workers”, with “relevant risk mitigation measures… fully embedded” in its policies.
(Reporting by Chloé Farand; editing by Megan Rowling)
The post Rights group finds abusive conditions for migrants working on UAE renewables appeared first on Climate Home News.
Rights group finds abusive conditions for migrants working on UAE renewables
Discussing climate change can make a difference. Focusing on the impacts in everyday life is a good place to start, experts say.
When Bad Bunny climbed onto broken power lines during his Super Bowl halftime show, millions of viewers saw a spectacle. Climate communicators saw a lesson in how to talk about climate change.
Wondering How to Talk About Climate Change? Take a Lesson from Bad Bunny
Sydney, Thursday 19 March 2026 — In response to escalating attacks on gas fields in the Middle East, including Israeli strikes on Iran’s giant South Pars gas field and Iranian retaliations on gas fields in Qatar and Saudi Arabia, the following lines can be attributed to Solaye Snider, Campaigner at Greenpeace Australia Pacific:
“The targeting of gas fields across the Middle East is a perilous escalation that reinforces just how vulnerable our fossil-fuelled world really is.
“Oil and gas have long been used as tools of power and coercion by authoritarian regimes. They cause climate chaos and environmental pollution and they drive conflict and war. The energy security of every nation still hooked on gas, including Australia, is under direct threat.
“For countries that are reliant on gas imports, like Sri Lanka, Pakistan and South Korea, this crisis is just getting started. It can take months to restart a gas export facility once it is shut down, meaning the shockwaves of these strikes will be felt for a long time to come.
“It is a gross and tragic injustice that while civilians are killed and lose their homes to this escalating violence, and families struggle with a tightening cost-of-living, gas giants like Woodside and Santos have seen their share prices surge on the prospect of windfall war profits.
“We must break this cycle. Transitioning to local renewable energy is the way to protect Australian households from the inherent volatility of fossil fuels like gas.”
-ENDS-
Images available for download via the Greenpeace Media Library
Media contact: Lucy Keller on 0491 135 308 or lkeller@greenpeace.org
Greenpeace response to escalating attacks on gas fields in Middle East
Climate Change
DeBriefed 20 March 2026: Energy crisis deepens | Brazil’s new climate plan | New Zealand climate case
Welcome to Carbon Brief’s DeBriefed.
An essential guide to the week’s key developments relating to climate change.
This week
Iran war fallout continues
WORK FROM HOME: The International Energy Agency has advised its member countries to take 10 steps in response to the ongoing energy crisis fuelled by the Iran war, including reducing highway speeds and encouraging people to work from home, said the Guardian. It came after retaliatory attacks between Israel and Iran continued to destroy energy infrastructure in the Middle East, causing energy prices to soar further, said Reuters.
SUPPLY DISRUPTED: The IEA also said it is prepared to make more of its member nations’ 1.4bn-barrel oil reserves available to help ease the impacts of what it called the “biggest supply disruption in the history of the oil market”, reported Bloomberg. The outlet noted that Asian countries have been hit hardest by the shortages, caused by a “near-halt” of shipping through the Strait of Hormuz.
EU SUMMIT: The energy crisis dominated talks at an EU leaders summit on Thursday, said Politico. Arriving at the summit, Spain’s prime minister Pedro Sánchez attacked other European leaders for using the energy crisis as an excuse to “gut climate policies”, according to the EU Observer. The Financial Times said that some European leaders have asked the European Commission to overhaul its flagship emissions trading system (ETS) by summer in response to the energy crisis.
COAL BOOST: In response to the conflict, utility companies in Asia are “boosting coal-fired power generation to cut costs and safeguard energy supply”, said Reuters. UN climate change executive secretary Simon Stiell told Reuters: “If there was ever a moment to accelerate that energy transition, breaking dependencies which have shackled economies, this is the time.”
Around the world
- WINDFARM WINDFALL: The Trump administration in the US is considering a nearly $1bn settlement with TotalEnergies to cancel the French energy company’s two planned windfarms off the US east coast and have it instead invest in fossil-gas infrastructure in Texas, according to documents seen by the New York Times.
- BUSINESS CLASH: Following “clashes” with the agribusiness sector, Brazil launched its new climate plan, which calls for a 49-58% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions from 2022 levels by 2025 and includes “specific guidelines for different sectors”, reported Folha de Sao Paolo.
- SALES SLUMP: Sales of liquified petroleum gas from India’s state-run oil companies have fallen by 17% this month due to cuts in deliveries to commercial and industrial consumers “amid the widespread logistical bottlenecks triggered by the Iran war”, said the Economic Times.
- CUBAN ENERGY CRISIS: The US imposed an “effective oil blockade” on Cuba, leaving the country facing its “worst energy crisis in decades”, reported the Washington Post. Meanwhile, Chinese exports of solar panels to the island have “skyrocketed” since 2023, it added.
- RECORD HIGHS: An “unprecedented” heatwave in the western and south-western US is “shattering dozens of temperature records” and could lead to drought in California in the coming months, reported the Los Angeles Times.
- VULNERABILITY CONCERNS: Landslides that killed more than 100 people in southern Ethiopia have “renewed concerns about Ethiopia’s vulnerability to climate-related disasters”, said the Addis Standard.
1%
The percentage of England’s land surface that could be devoted to renewables by 2050, according to the long-awaited “land-use framework” released by the UK government this week and covered by Carbon Brief.
Latest climate research
- Approaching international climate action by shifting the burden of mitigation onto higher-income countries could avoid 13.5 million premature deaths from air pollution in middle- and lower-income countries by 2050 | The Lancet Global Health
- Beavers can turn the ecosystems surrounding streams into “persistent” sinks of carbon that can sequester an order of magnitude more than non-beaver-modified ecosystems can store | Communications Earth & Environment
- Mobile-phone data from seven diverse countries during the summer heatwaves of 2022-23 showed a “widespread tendency to withdraw into homes” and an increase in out-of-home activities that can offer cooling, such as indoor retail | Environmental Research: Climate
(For more, see Carbon Brief’s in-depth daily summaries of the top climate news stories on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.)
Captured
Carbon Brief this week published a significant update to its map of how climate change is affecting extreme weather events around the world. The map now includes 232 new extreme weather events from studies published in 2024 and 2025. Of these events, 196 were made more severe or more likely to occur by human-driven climate change, 12 were made less severe or less likely to occur and 10 had no discernible human influence. (The remaining 14 studies were inconclusive.)
Spotlight
New Zealand breaks new ground on climate litigation
This week, Carbon Brief speaks to experts about a first-of-its-kind climate lawsuit in New Zealand.
Earlier this week, representatives from two environmentally focused legal advocacy groups challenged the New Zealand government’s climate-action plan in court.
The plaintiffs argued that the measures laid out in the plan are insufficient to achieve the country’s legal obligation to hold global warming to 1.5C above pre-industrial temperatures.
The case could be “influential” in shaping lawsuits and rulings around the world, one legal expert not involved in the case told Carbon Brief.
Reductions vs removals
The new case contends that there are several issues regarding the New Zealand government’s response to climate change.
One of the key arguments the plaintiffs make is that New Zealand’s second emissions reduction plan, which covers the period from 2026-30, is overreliant on the use of tree-planting to achieve its targets.
When the plan was released in December 2024, it was “immediately clear that it was a pretty lacklustre plan”, Eliza Prestidge Oldfield, senior legal researcher at the Environmental Law Initiative, one of the groups behind the legal case, told Carbon Brief.
The plan called for large-scale planting of pine tree plantations, which are not native to New Zealand and have a high risk of burning. Because of this, there are concerns about how permanent any carbon removal provided by these plantations actually can be, experts told Carbon Brief.
Catherine Higham, senior policy fellow at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment who was not involved in the case, said:
“The lawyers are arguing that there are real challenges with equating the emissions that you may be able to remove from the atmosphere through afforestation with actual emissions reductions, which are much more certain.”
‘Global dialogue’
While other climate lawsuits elsewhere in the world have also focused on the inadequacy of a government’s plan to meet its stated emissions-reduction targets, this is the first such case that addresses the role of removals head-on.
Lucy Maxwell, co-director of the Climate Litigation Network, told Carbon Brief that the lawsuit “builds on a decade of climate litigation” in national, regional and international courts.
Maxwell, who was not involved in the New Zealand case, added that there is a “real global dialogue” between, not just plaintiffs, but national courts as well. She said:
“[National courts] look to common issues that have been decided in other countries. They’re not binding on that court if it’s at the national level, but they are influential.”
Given that many other countries have legal frameworks requiring their governments to create plans outlining the pathway to their long-term climate targets, Prestidge Oldfield told Carbon Brief that other jurisdictions “should be interested in these questions around the level of certainty”.
Higham noted that, even if the case is successful, addressing the plan’s shortfalls will face its own set of challenges. She told Carbon Brief:
“A lot of these decisions are political and they can be politically contentious…Those [measures] have to be put into action through legislation and that is then subject to the usual political process. So that’s where the challenge comes in.”
While she could not speculate on the outcome of the case, Prestidge Oldfield said it was “very heartening” to see that both the judge and the opposing counsel “appreciated how much of a concern climate change is globally”.
She added:
“It’s not a given that the judge would even be interested in climate change.”
Watch, read, listen
COMMON APPROACH: The Heated podcast analysed fossil-fuel advertisements and highlighted the most common deception tactics they employed.
THREAT ASSESSMENT: Mongabay mapped the potential threat that oil extraction poses to Venezuela’s ecosystems, including the Amazon rainforest and its coral reefs.
SALT LAKES? GREAT!: High Country News interviewed journalist Dr Caroline Tracey about her new book on saline lakes – such as Utah’s Great Salt Lake – the threats that face them and what they can teach us.
Coming up
- 23 March-2 April: Third meeting of the preparatory commission for the High Seas Treaty, New York
- 24-27 March: 64th session of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Bangkok
- 26-29 March: 14th ministerial conference of the World Trade Organization, Yaoundé, Cameroon
Pick of the jobs
- International Centre of Research for the Environment and Development (CIRAD), IPCC chapter scientist | Salary: €3,200-3,750 per month. Location: Nogent-sur-Marne, France
- Avaaz, chief of staff | Salary: Dependent on location. Location: Remote, with preferred time zones
- Green Party, social media officer | Salary: £31,592-£32,192. Location: Remote or Westminster, UK
DeBriefed is edited by Daisy Dunne. Please send any tips or feedback to debriefed@carbonbrief.org.
This is an online version of Carbon Brief’s weekly DeBriefed email newsletter. Subscribe for free here.
The post DeBriefed 20 March 2026: Energy crisis deepens | Brazil’s new climate plan | New Zealand climate case appeared first on Carbon Brief.
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