Just transition
For climate chaos to be avoided, many things have to change about the way in which our societies and economies are organised, including the values that serve as their organising principles.
- A society that is built on the fulfilment of human and labour rights and the commitment to stay within planetary boundaries, pursues wellbeing and builds a society of care, where everyone can access decent jobs, health, housing, education, culture, and leisure. Where individual and collective rights are respected.
- A society where solidarity, justice, and equity are the guiding forces of decision making. Where the wealthy do their fair shares and polluters are held accountable for the damage that they cause.
Just Transition as a critical component for achieving those shifts and for doing so in a way that is in line with climate justice, as organising the transition in a just way is the guarantee for achieving social justice while at the same time addressing the climate and biodiversity crises.
History of Just Transition
The Just Transition concept was developed by U.S. workers in response to ‘job blackmail’ in the late 1970s when the Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Workers Union, led by Anthony Mazzocchi, sought support for workers who were asked by their employers to choose between their jobs and their health.
In the 1990 ‘Superfund for Workers’’ to provide financial support and higher education opportunities for workers in affected industries. By the late 1990s, several U.S. and Canadian unions had endorsed the Just Transition as an approach, and the environmental justice movement took on the concept, calling for the allocation of funds to support the transition for workers and communities dependent on the fossil fuel industry.
At the international level, from Kyoto onwards, the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) began including Just Transition wording in their statements at global climate and sustainability conferences. Just Transition emerges as an approach seeking to secure workers’ support for climate action.
CAN’s Just Transition Principles
- Distributional Justice: A Just Transition distributes fairly the cost and benefits of actions to protect all life from climate chaos.
- Procedural Justice: A Just Transition ensures inclusive and equitable decision-making process guiding the transition, and collective ownership and management of the new, decarbonised energy system by the community stakeholders and right-holders.
- Restorative Justice: A Just Transition addresses historical damages against individuals, communities, the environment, and health, with a particular focus on rectifying or ameliorating the situations of colonised, harmed or disenfranchised communities, and at risk environments. It is about redress: healing people and the land.
- Intergenerational Justice: A Just Transition is guided by the urgency of protecting all life on this planet so that future generations can have a healthy and prosperous life.
- Transformational intent: A Just Transition promotes alternative pathways that undermine the dominant economic system, bringing together short-term policies with a system critical approach, which allows the emergence, within relatively “feasible” policies, of practices of equality for all and local control, of a more robust democracy where gender, race, and class bias fades into the past.
Just Transition in the UNFCCC
- COP16: For the first time the concept of Just Transition made it into an official decision.
- COP21: Just Transition included in the Preamble of the Paris Agreement: “[Take] into account the imperatives of a just transition of the workforce and the creation of decent work and quality jobs in accordance with nationally defined development priorities […]” and adopted as a key area within the work programme under the agenda item on Improved Forum on the impact of the implementation of response measures.
- COP24: “Solidarity and Just Transition Silesia Declaration” with a strong workers’ focus.
- COP26: Commits to “support developing countries and emerging economies’ economic growth, the creation of decent and sustainable green jobs and new sustainable investments as, globally, we transition to net zero”.
- COP27: Agrees Just Transition Work Programme (JTWP).
- COP28: Agrees scope of JTWP
- To address workforce and other socio-economic dimensions, discuss international cooperation, and cover ongoing work on just transition outside the UNFCCC,
- Acknowledges the importance of human rights, social justice, and gender equality.
- Recognises labour rights, social protection, and social dialogue.
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