Last month, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) held its first Climate Week in Panamá City. This gathering marked a pivotal space to inform and shape deliberations for the upcoming climate talks in Bonn, Germany, in June, which will in turn set the tone and the agenda for the Conference of the Parties (COP) 30 negotiations, to be held in Belém, Brazil, this November.
As members of the Just Transition Alliance (JTA), we provide resources for and organize with grassroots groups at the intersection of labor and environmental justice. We participated in these climate talks to advance policies and other actions proposed and led by frontline workers, Indigenous Peoples, and environmental justice communities. Unfortunately, what we witnessed in Panamá City deeply concerned us. Many official conversations during the climate week focused on supporting false solutions that perpetuate climate chaos. Upcoming Paris Agreement discussions must not continue this advocacy and must instead create climate-just solutions based on Just Transition and Indigenous Just Transition Principles.
False “Solutions” Intensify Climate Injustices
This year’s climate talks include a focus on just transition, one of several topics that will shape how the Paris Agreement is implemented. Just transition refers to working at the intersection of environmental and economic justice and labor so that frontline workers, Indigenous Peoples, and fenceline communities (neighborhoods located adjacent to industrial facilities) can organize pathways away from dangerous, extractive systems and toward local, healthy, and regenerative economies. But several of the proposals we heard in Panamá City are far from just.
Many speakers advocated for market-based mechanisms that would allow corporate polluters and high-polluting countries to continue with business as usual, harming already disproportionately impacted communities and perpetuating lethal systems. This climate finance advocacy included an emphasis on carbon offset credits and markets.
We have serious concerns about market-based “solutions” and the failure to hold polluting industries accountable. Existing climate finance mechanisms tend to rely on undemocratic banks administering loans that rarely benefit groups at the frontlines of climate crises, rather than on direct financial transfers. UNFCCC negotiations have yet to mainstream the Polluter Pays Principle. This principle states that companies and other polluters responsible for environmental harms and poisoning must pay for their actions.
The climate talks also often discussed REDD+ as a “solution.” According to the UNFCCC, “REDD stands for ‘Reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation in developing countries.’ The ‘+’ stands for additional forest-related activities that protect the climate, namely sustainable management of forests and the conservation and enhancement of forest carbon stocks.”
However, this colonial imposition continually has been proven to perpetuate damaging practices and human rights violations, while not reducing emissions. In practice, REDD+ often leads to land grabs from carbon traders, companies, and governments. This scheme provides financial incentives for minimizing emissions from deforestation, meaning that trees can still be logged if they are replaced elsewhere, often on industrial, monocultural plantations. These plantations lack biodiversity and disrupt ecosystems that support Indigenous Peoples and local communities. Moreover, carbon stored in trees will eventually be released when the trees die.
All the while, big corporations continue polluting with the purchase of forest carbon credits, allowing them to “offset” their emissions by purchasing or “trading” the equivalent of their pollution that will then be “stored” in forestry projects. With false solutions like REDD+, which often worsen global heating, the Global North can continue increasing carbon emissions.
As Tom Goldtooth, Executive Director of the Indigenous Environmental Network, said, “We would need to plant three planets worth of trees to start moving the needle toward being carbon neutral, and we only have one planet.”
With the Bonn climate talks approaching, conversations should not replicate agenda-setting discussions that impede global and national mechanisms for just transitions.
Implementing Just Transition Principles and Practices
Instead of pushing harmful “solutions,” upcoming Paris Agreement implementation talks must commit to several indispensable actions for co-creating livable communities based on Just Transition and Indigenous Just Transition Principles, in all stages of climate policymaking. These intersectional, justice-oriented solutions include participatory budgetary processes and providing just transition funding to the most affected communities.
First, the UNFCCC must implement participatory budgeting processes. These processes would involve workers and community members leading and deciding how to spend public budgets for adaptation and other necessary projects and investments. Second, Global South and other gravely affected workers and environmental justice communities must be compensated for loss and damages and have access to just transition funding to implement self-determined, community-led projects that support capacity building. Third, just transition funding must be prioritized through new, additional, transparent, and non-debt-creating funding. Finally, implementation efforts must fund the local generation of community-proposed and -led solutions to climate chaos, such as agroecology and renewable energy microgrids integrated with food, water, and connected with regional energy systems. All of these actions must honor Indigenous Peoples by adhering to free, prior, and informed consent.
Though far from exhaustive, these priorities would ensure that what is produced as “green” does not shift a burden on the Global South and that local/regional economies are supported. An extractive economy needs fossil fuels to survive, and we cannot survive with continued reliance on fossil fuels.
Mobilizing Grassroots Power for Global Climate Justice
Building power for transformative, needed policy changes requires coalitional, grassroots organizing. The mobilizations being organized for COP30 are energized by an impressive magnitude of groups, constituted by strong relationships that have been cultivated and nurtured over years and decades. These efforts remind us of the 2010 World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth in Cochabamba, Bolivia, where more than 35,000 people gathered and drafted the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth. This declaration outlined several obligations and argued for the inherent rights of all living beings, including the right to be free of poisoning and other forms of violence and to live in healthy environments. Recollecting this movement history, we eagerly anticipate COP30 for the grassroots, coalitional power that will be experienced.
The demands that JTA members are bringing to Belém in November are grounded in mobilizations with many similarly-aligned grassroots groups and non-profit organizations. In collaboration with the Global Campaign to Demand Climate Justice, we will amplify our calls during the People’s Summit, the MAR’s International Encuentro, and several planned demonstrations. Just transitions must center the needs, deep involvement, and leadership of workers, Indigenous Peoples, and environmental justice communities. We will demand nothing less.
José T. Bravo is the executive director of the Just Transition Alliance and a long-time labor, anti-toxics, and environmental justice organizer and movement leader. Bravo served on the drafting team for the Environmental Justice Principles (1991) and the Jemez Principles for Democratic Organizing (1996). He has dedicated his life to building shared power with workers and environmental justice communities.
Nona Chai is a Program Coordinator at the Just Transition Alliance and a University of Pittsburgh Mobilization and Political Economy Summer 2025 Research Fellow. They employ their social science training to examine extractive systems and industries and regional regenerative economic alternatives.
Catalina de Onís Fox and Fernando Tormos-Aponte, members of the Just Transition Alliance, contributed to this piece.