Justice Must Lead the Transition.
A rising of civil society, grassroots organisations, movements, and unions is uniting to launch a global campaign supporting communities and workers on the frontlines of the transition—those whose lives and livelihoods are directly impacted by the shift away from fossil fuels.
This campaign demands that COP negotiations centre justice from the start.
Because a Just Transition cannot succeed if it excludes the very people it claims to protect.
A Movement Grounded in Practice.
As climate negotiations unfold and policymaking accelerates toward COP30 in Belém, Just Transition Rising is bringing together workers, social movements, feminist economists, Indigenous leaders, and grassroots organisations to insist that real climate action is already happening on the ground.
In May, over 1,000 community leaders, grassroots organisers, and union representatives from around the world came together for a landmark global online assembly. The event created a powerful space to share lived experiences, deepen solidarity, and expose the structural barriers standing in the way of equitable climate transitions.
These aren’t abstract proposals. This is climate ambition from the ground up. It’s already working. It now needs scale and support.
🇮🇹 GKN factory workers in Italy turned layoffs into a worker-owned cooperative building low-carbon transport technologies.
🇮🇳 Women workers from SEWA in India contribute monthly to local climate resilience funds to protect their communities against floods and droughts.
🇨🇱 Wastepickers in Chile have linked their decades-long labour struggle to national climate and circular economy policies.
🇦🇷 Community leaders in Argentina are resisting greenwashing in extractive sectors, calling for land rights and resource sovereignty.
These stories are the foundation of effective, just climate action.
What we’re hearing from workers and communities isn’t isolated. It’s systemic. And the data tells the story:
- Women are projected to hold just 25% of green jobs by 2030, with marginalised communities remaining underrepresented and underfunded in green job schemes and climate financing.
- 32 million people are employed in fossil fuel energy alone—millions more work in adjacent high-carbon sectors like transport, agriculture, and heavy industry.
- Over 60% of the global workforce—around 2 billion people—work informally, without safety nets or job protections. Many are in sectors directly impacted by the transition.
- In 54 Global South countries, governments spend more on debt repayment than on climate or social protection.
- Only a tiny share of climate finance reaches justice components of the energy transition—90% flows to large-scale mitigation tech and market guarantees.
- Women are projected to hold just 25% of green jobs by 2030, with marginalised communities remaining underrepresented and underfunded in green job schemes and climate financing.
Five key demands that we’re now taking to policymakers, funders and UNFCCC actors on the road to COP30:
- Protect core Just Transition principles: Ensure that Just Transition is aligned with the Paris Agreement and rooted in human rights, labour rights, public participation, inclusion, and international solidarity.
- Make Just Transition financeable: Recognise Just Transition policies as eligible for climate finance, acknowledging their critical role in enabling higher ambition.
- Integrate Just Transition into national planning: Embed Just Transition strategies into Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), national climate plans, and long-term development strategies.
- Institutionalise participation and co-creation: Establish formal spaces at the national level for consultation and co-design of Just Transition pathways – bringing in workers, communities, and civil society.
- Launch the Belém Action Mechanism (BAM): A multilateral initiative to accelerate and support country efforts to transition, making funding and technical support more accessible, taking action to remove barriers to the transition, such as trade or debt, and build a global peer network for shared learning and collaboration.
Join the movement
Whether you’re a negotiator, funder, NGO, or business leader, this is a moment to act with courage and clarity.