ECO 5, COP30
Filling the Just Transition Hole with Transition Minerals
The global renewables boom has unleashed an unprecedented scramble for transition minerals. But there’s a big hole at the centre of the climate conversation. While everyone talks about accelerating the transition, few ask the most basic questions about what it takes to build it. Solar wafers, battery cells, wind turbines, transmission lines, all require critical energy transition minerals sourced largely from the Global South.
At COP29, many had hoped the UN Secretary-General’s Panel on Critical Energy Transition Minerals would lead to an honest global debate on this. But momentum stalled, the work remained politically delicate, and a glaring gap opened in the process.
Fortunately, the Just Transition Work Programme (JTWP) has stepped in to fill that vacuum. It has recognised a simple truth that negotiators too often avoid – you cannot talk about just transitions without confronting the governance, human rights, and economic justice dimensions of the minerals on which the transition depends.
And this year, something shifted. Some developed countries publicly acknowledged, for the first time within the JTWP, the need to recognise transition minerals as a key element. A step forward, yes, but the devil lies in the detail. Their language leaned toward securing supply chains, not building value chains in Global South countries that actually possess these minerals.
No shock there. But thankfully, Burkina Faso and South Africa pushed back, clearly stating that these minerals must be part of how the Global South transitions in a just way, through industrialisation, value addition, and economic diversification.
There were, however, also a few developed countries with large mineral sectors that echoed the need for processing and local beneficiation. There is an important signal here: there are points where Global South and Global North interests can align.
Meanwhile, the UN Panel’s landmark principles continue to offer a path forward:
- Human, including workers and indigenous peoples rights are non-negotiable.
- Free, Prior and Informed Consent must be upheld.
- Community participation and protection must be ensured.
- Ecological no-go zones are essential.
- Circularity cannot be reduced to a corporate slogan.
It is time to stop pretending that mining is climate-friendly by default or that Global South countries will magically climb clean-tech value chains without fair rules, investment, and market access.
So here’s where COP30 matters. The JTWP can help close the gap in the energy transition conversation by ensuring Parties:
✔ Include transition minerals in the JTWP text to ensure that future work explicitly addresses the role of minerals in delivering a fair, equitable, and development-aligned transition.
✔ Endorse the UN SG Panel’s roadmap and commit to supporting its next phase of work.
✔ Embed key Panel principles into the Belém Action Mechanism for Global Just Transition so that communities, ecosystems, and local development remain central.
COP30’s success will be measured not by declarations but by the processes it sets in motion, and the extractive patterns it helps prevent. A truly just transition begins when the holes left by mining is finally filled with justice, rights, and development for the countries that supply the world’s clean energy future.
Short COP Memory and 33 years of Adaptation Amnesia
ECO wants to remind negotiators that the Global Goal on Adaptation (GGA) is fundamentally incomplete without finance! Time and again, Parties have recognized, in the text and in the rooms, that the extent to which developing countries can implement adaptation depends on the delivery of the means of implementation and support by developed countries.
We’ve gone through two processes and four years to get here, with a clear understanding that finance and adaptation are inseparable. Yet somehow, negotiators seem to have developed collective amnesia.
The package of indicators produced by experts is also clear. No less than 48 out of the 100 indicators rely on developed countries delivering on their commitments. It’s curious how conveniently Parties remember certain things in one room, only for them to fall out of memory in the next. This selective and short-term memory undermines coherence, the spirit of the Paris Agreement, and trust in multilateralism.
ECO stresses that urgency must be matched with action. A clear, ambitious outcome on the GGA is essential in Belém. The work programme must conclude with a strong signal from negotiators that adaptation is finally being prioritised, after 33 years of neglect and invisibility under the shadow of mitigation. In the few sessions left, Parties must chart a clear path for implementation that will, in the years to come, deliver a comprehensive stocktake that measures not only emissions and gaps, but also how equipped we are to cope with the escalating climate crisis.
Militarism Is Fueling the Climate Crisis — COP30 Must Confront It
“Spending twice as much on weapons as we do on climate action is paving the way for climate apocalypse. There will be no energy security in a world at war.”
— President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Leaders Summit
Yesterday, the Baku Hub Annual High-Level Dialogue gathered to “advance peace-positive climate action.” It remains the only official COP30 event addressing the link between peace and climate justice – a glaring omission from an agenda that claims to secure a liveable planet.
Despite a growing recognition of the intersection between conflict and the climate crisis, COP30 risks erasing peace from the climate conversation altogether. Previous summits took small but meaningful steps: COP28 adopted the Declaration on Climate, Relief, Recovery, and Peace, and COP29 launched the Baku Peace Hub, each dedicating “peace days” to elevate the issue. This year, even those symbolic spaces are practically gone.
The silence on militarism is especially troubling. Global military spending reached a record $2.7 trillion in 2024 and is on track to reach $6.6 trillion by 2035. This is money used to devastate frontline communities, with disproportionate impacts on the marginalised among those, including Indigenous Peoples, people of African descent and local communities. It also funds the pollution of the environment, exacerbates natural resource extraction, and diverts resources from financing the just transition, mitigation, adaptation, and loss and damage.
Nowhere is the climate finance gap more unjust than in conflict-affected countries. Governments are pouring billions into weapons, yet the communities most devastated by war and climate breakdown are left without the funds needed to rebuild or adapt.
Every dollar poured into the military produces over twice the emissions of a dollar spent elsewhere. Yet most countries are not required to report military emissions to the UNFCCC, despite being responsible for an estimated 5.5% of total global emissions.
World leaders, from Colombia to Cuba, and from Mexico to Latvia, have connected fossil fuel dependencies to militarism. Now, the UNFCCC must address militarism.
We call for:
- Stepping up ambition: Include military emissions in updated NDCs before COP31.
- Reallocation of military budgets: redirect spending to close the climate finance gap.
- Integration of peace and justice: recognise that true climate justice cannot coexist with war and structural violence. Ending militarisation begins with stopping aggressors and demanding accountability.
The path to a liveable future demands more than decarbonisation – it necessitates demilitarisation. As Lula warned, there is no energy security and just transition in a world at war. There is no longer time to ignore this truth.
ICJ: A Clarifying Lens, not Handcuffs
Several Parties are feeling nervous this week. Turns out, clarifying your legal obligations is uncomfortable when you’ve been ignoring them. ECO heard parties insist that the UNFCCC is a space for collaboration, not litigation. ECO agrees. Which is exactly why the International Court of Justice (ICJ) fits in perfectly. The ICJ clarifies what collaboration requires, so you can avoid litigation. The advisory opinion doesn’t create new rules. It simply reads aloud the ones states already signed.
You might have forgotten (because it’s happening all behind closed doors) but we’re reviewing the WIM this year! And look who showed up with receipts: its the ICJ Advisory Opinion, delivering long overdue legal clarity on state obligations on climate change, including on Loss & Damage.
ECO is glad to see some parties actively using this clarity in the negotiations. But seeing some Parties staying silent (developed, do you need coffee?) or worse, pushing back, raises the question: why ask the world’s highest court for advice if you were not intending to follow it? Spoiler alert: Ignoring or resisting binding law doesn’t make it unbind.
Missed the memo? No worries, ECO took notes for you. So sit back, listen up, and most importantly, pay up your fair share for L&D finance.
1. 1.5°C is the legal limit. L&D escalates with every fraction of warming. → Party assignment: Back to the drawing board with your NDCs. Phase out fossil fuels and show your work.
2. States must provide resources at the scale of L&D needs, based on CBDR-RC. → Party assignment: Hundreds of billions annually in public, grant-based funding. Not millions. We can tell the difference. → Bonus assignment: Mandate a Loss and Damage Gap Report so we can all see the homework you’re not doing.
3. Frontline communities have a right to full reparation. Those who breach obligations must repair harm. → Party assignment: Recognize that the UNFCCC L&D landscape is not fit for purpose. Respond accordingly.
Losses and damages are human rights violations and those who cause them must be held accountable through remedial action, non-repetition, and crucially, through reparation. There is no process loophole or decision footnote that erases these duties. So if this process isn’t about upholding international climate law, care to explain ECO what it’s for?
Feeling overwhelmed, wealthy high-emitting states? The ICJ thought of that too. You’re responsible for holding private corporations accountable for their climate destruction. Regulating and taxing big polluters can help pay your L&D bill. Who knew accountability could also solve your budget problems? Class dismissed. Now let’s get to work.
Where is love, don’t hurt me no more
ECO, sat in the back of today’s “collective therapy” session at COP and honestly wondered if I’d walked into a couples counsellor’s office by mistake. We talked about toxic relationships, massages, yoga, guardrails, even whether this all ends in marriage or divorce. The Presidency begged everyone to be gentle, no finger-pointing, lots of “safe space” energy. Cute. Except this isn’t a spat between equals – it’s a long-term toxic relationship where the partner with power keeps hurting you and then says you’re being “too emotional” when you point it out.
Because let’s be clear: the global North is still the one buying the giant bouquet of new oil and gas expansion while saying “I’ve changed, I swear, 1.5 is my soulmate now.” A handful of rich producers are planning most of the new fossil extraction, even as they demand tougher NDCs from countries already drowning and burning. That’s not climate love, that’s classic abuser logic: you must do more, I must stay “realistic”.
On finance, the romance is just as twisted. After years of abuse, Article 9.1 was the ‘I’ll make it up to you”: predictable public money from developed to developing countries. Instead, what arrives is a handful of small cheques for climate finance, wrapped in big speeches, and most of it lent with interest. Imagine a partner who insists they’re paying for dinner, then hands you a detailed invoice the next morning and logs it in the relationship spreadsheet as a “gift to you”. That’s the climate finance regime: love letters written on IOUs, and the Global South asked to be grateful for the privilege of going deeper into debt.
Meanwhile, in our Belem “therapy room”, every time developing countries try to talk about the real stuff – Article 9.1, trade measures, who actually has money and who actually has expansion plans – the rules of the session change. No finger-pointing, no naming names, sovereignty, guardrails. The North wants the benefits of a couple’s session where the therapist never names the dysfunctional patterns, only ensures that you politely phrase your pain.
While listening to delegates from the Global North, ECO kept on thinking about this phrase: there is no love, only proof of love. In climate terms, proof of love would look like no new fossil expansion from those most responsible and most capable; real, grant-based finance for adaptation and loss and damage anchored in Article 9.1; and rules on trade that don’t punish countries for trying to develop. Until then, all the talk of therapy, massages and safe spaces is just the language of a toxic relationship. And ECO will keep asking the only question that matters: where is love – and when will you stop hurting us?
The Funeral for Fossil Fuels: A Climate Protest in Belém
ECO heard that there’s a clarion call at COP30 for a pathway to overcome our dependency on fossil fuels. This call to action is starting to garner support from other countries. Colombia is looking for countries to sign up to a declaration, and during an event with Marina Silva, delegates from several countries showed support for the idea. For this to be the COP of truth, it must confront the fact that we cannot stay within a safe and acceptable carbon budget and avoid dangerous temperature rise, without a fast, just and equitably planned phase out of fossil fuels.
As negotiations continue tomorrow, the streets of Belém will come alive with “The Funeral for Fossil Fuels” at the global Climate March at the Cúpula dos Povos (Peoples’ Summit); a symbolic performance marking the beginning of the end of the fossil fuel era. Thousands of artists, community leaders, and environmental defenders will join the action, turning protest into art, and grief into hope.
ECO would like to remind delegates that the evils of fossil fuels go well beyond powering more devastating and frequent extreme weather events that erase decades of development efforts, killing people and devastating livelihoods. They also only concentrate wealth in a few hands in a small number of countries. They are hard to find, extract, transport, refine, freeze, and store, so only a few companies that socialise all the harms while appropriating all the profits.
This concentration of power forces everyone else into the economics of exploitation while also pushing them into inescapable debt traps. Fossil fuels lead to spills, accidents and air pollution, harming people and biodiversity. They are also weaponised in geopolitics as “soft power” and when that fails, the real weapons come out. All in all, it’s high time to free the world from the stranglehold of fossil fuels.
As an initiative from the Global South, the Fossil Fuel Funeral will be a powerful message that the future desired by the global majority is one powered by 100% renewable energy and implemented in a just and equitable manner.
In the 20 years that scientists say we have to complete this transition to renewable energy, workers must be retrained and compensated, the youth must be equipped with the skills to create a future based on renewable energy and the just energy transition must not continue the shameful legacy of the fossil fuel industry.
Is Science Getting in the Way (of market players getting their way?)
Spoiler alert: Science isn’t optional only when it’s convenient. The best available science must guide climate action. And it’s not just ECO saying it, it’s the ICJ.
ECO has heard that some Parties are asking for guidance to revise the Article 6.4 standards that the Supervisory Body adopted over the last year. Apparently, the idea of science-based requirements for conservatively estimating mitigation impacts and guaranteeing them on climate-relevant timeframes are proving… inconvenient.
How inconvenient, you ask? Well, some say holding projects that are vulnerable to re-releasing their sequestered CO2 to these standards would get in the way of the commercial viability of the market. And we simply can’t have that, can we?
Let’s be crystal clear, when the vast majority of calls for weaker standards comes from players holding direct or indirect financial interests in carbon markets, ECO smells something, and it isn’t climate ambition. It’s hot air.
If the Article 6.4 Supervisory Body’s standards make some projects commercially unviable, that’s not a flaw in the science, that’s a feature. Projects that can’t deliver real climate benefits on climate relevant timescales shouldn’t be propped up by carbon markets. As for the argument that carbon credits could be used to finance nature; financing nature by linking it to offsetting ongoing fossil emissions, whose climate impacts last for millennia, is not protecting nature. It’s pretending to protect nature, while giving polluters a permission slip to continue damaging nature.
And speaking of unscientific, an extension of the deadline for CDM projects to request transition is only going to provide space for credits that are not based on the best available science to proliferate. An analysis of the first of these transitioning projects to transition, already found it is more than 26x overcredited. These credits do not belong in a Paris-aligned world.
ECO calls on all Parties: Do not prolong the life of a mechanism long discredited by scientific evidence. Do not water down the Supervisory Body’s standards at COP30. And do not override climate science and turn Article 6 into a greenwashing vehicle, just because the truth is inconvenient.
You know what’s actually inconvenient? Flooding. Droughts. Wildfires. Watching ecosystems collapse because we opted for cheap credits over climate integrity.
Here in Belém, surrounded by the Amazon, some are arguing we should set a lower bar for offsetting ongoing fossil fuel emissions. This would only contribute to climate change and compromise forests worldwide. The irony is not lost on ECO.
The choice at COP30 is simple, follow the best available climate science or watch the Article 6 market become even more of a false climate solution.
How can the Mirage of “Climate Smart Ag” persist in the Belém weather?
After three long years of talks under the Sharm el-Sheikh joint work on implementation of climate action on agriculture and food security, one might expect some progress by now. Instead, it feels like déjà vu, or worse, several steps backwards. Yesterday draft conclusions appeared, and, well… The text made ECO rub its eyes to be sure it wasn’t a mirage from the past.
Apparently, the magic formula for fixing agriculture still includes “climate-smart agriculture,” “precision farming,” and “artificial intelligence.” As if doubling down on the same corporate-controlled models of greenwash that created the crisis in the first place needed some backing by UNFCCC. These so-called “smart” approaches mainly consolidate agribusiness power in food systems, including the livestock sector, while sidelining small-scale food producers and pastoralists and fisherfolks.
Other dangerous distractions, the well known carbon markets – while their rules keep being undermined in other negotiations rooms – also make a comeback in this agri-mirage. Selling “credits” for emissions that were actually never permanently reduced does NOT cool the planet, nor lead to a Just Transition that feeds people and protects jobs. Under Article 6, the rules for carbon trading remain clear as mud, with safeguards constantly being watered down, and offering zero guarantees that farmers or the right to food will be protected. In practice, carbon market projects often mean land grabbing, exclusion of local communities, and empty promises. Agriculture negotiators should be the ones defending food, farmers and land rights – not the ones jeopardising them.
Going forward, rather than having multiple rounds of greenwashed déjà vu, it’s time to ditch these false solutions once and for all. The real path has always been clear, and CAN has been pushing for it for decades: agroecology and public finance for small-scale producers, especially women, are the only real solutions to make agriculture climate resilient.
Join the Adaptation Finance Bootcamp!
Feeling like you’ve been sprinting from 9.5 to GGA rooms, then dashing to NAPs and agenda consultations, just to keep up with all the talk about a new adaptation finance goal?
You’re not alone: it’s everywhere, and it’s coming for us all!
Get your stamina (and your strategy) ready as we train for:
- At least 120bn in adaptation finance per year by 2030
- Finance that is additional, predictable, public and grants-based
- Finance that is accessible to, and locally-led by, climate-impacted communities
Join the Belem 2025 challenge!
Whether you’re a veteran negotiator or a wide-eyed newcomer, this bootcamp will build your adaptation finance endurance, one session at a time, as we work towards our goal.
Where? Everywhere. (Check 9.5, GGA, NAPs, SCF, agenda consultations.)
When? Constantly.
Bring: Water, running shoes, and resilience
How to sign up? Shout “ADAPTATION FINANCE!” in the hallway and someone will appear.
Warning: Joining may lead to increased ambition, improved resilience, and chronic exposure to acronyms
WE STAND IN SOLIDARITY WITH ALL PEOPLES SUFFERING FROM GENOCIDE, WARS, OCCUPATION, AND GOVERNMENT VIOLENCE THROUGH CLIMATE CHANGE.
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Download file: http://ECO-14-November-2025.pdf