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.
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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)
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Rights group finds abusive conditions for migrants working on UAE renewables
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.
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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.