Belém, 10 November 2025 — More than 1,000 organisations from 106 countries – spanning trade unions, Indigenous leaders, feminist and youth movements, Afro‑descendant and peasant groups, environmental advocates, disability networks and community organisations – have united to urge governments to stop treating climate action as a numbers game. Their open letter calls for a Just Transition that makes climate work for the people who live its consequences.
COP30, billed as the first “implementation COP” since Paris, is seen as a test of whether multilateralism can still deliver after years of drift and broken trust. A decade after the Paris Agreement pledged to secure a Just transition, safeguarding rights and livelihoods, that promise remains unfulfilled, and it’s not without consequences: climate action has stalled, inequality has deepened and communities have been left behind.
Access the letter below or here. The full list of signatories can be found here.
Open Letter to All States Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change
The time for making Just Transition happen is now
Excellencies,
Ten years ago, the Paris Agreement carried a promise: that climate action would protect people’s rights and livelihoods – placing the effort of transition on those most responsible for the crisis. The commitment to implement a Just Transition implied centering workers, communities, and Indigenous Peoples – to build a future rooted in rights, fairness, equity and solidarity. It was also a call for unprecedented international cooperation, so that every country could find new pathways to social and economic justice within planetary boundaries.
A decade later, that promise remains unfulfilled.
Instead, we have seen stalled climate action, widening inequality, and people left behind.
At COP27, the establishment of the Just Transition Work Programme (JTWP) was a crucial step toward putting justice at the heart of climate action. But words alone cannot hold back the tide. Action cannot wait. At COP30 in Belém, governments have the chance to turn a long-deferred vision into reality.
Our organisations – representing workers, Indigenous Peoples, People of African Descent, feminists, youth, environmental and social movements, and communities on the frontlines – call on all Parties to take a decision in Belém that will tangibly improve the lives and livelihoods of millions of people, setting a new direction for climate cooperation: one that puts people and their rights at the centre.
We call for a breakthrough Just Transition package at COP30 that delivers:
- The Belém Action Mechanism (BAM) for Just Transition
A new multilateral mechanism to orient the entire international system behind people-centred transitions at local and national levels, where workers and communities are in charge of decisions that affect their lives and livelihoods. The BAM must make funding and technical support accessible; coordinate just transition efforts within and beyond the UNFCCC; address the global rules that act as barriers to a Just Transition; build a global network of focal points for shared learning and collaboration; and ensure formal representation of rights-holders and vulnerabilised groups. Grounded in the principles of equity and Common but Differentiated Responsibilities and Respective Capabilities (CBDR-RC), the BAM would put rights, fairness, support, and inclusion at the heart of climate cooperation.
- Just Transition Guardrails in the UNFCCC process
A shared framework anchored in rights, participation, and equality across sectors – including human and labour rights, Free, Prior and Informed Consent, genuine social dialogue with workers and inclusion of affected people. Guardrails must ensure that transitions create decent work, address inequalities, promote care and are supported by international cooperation and means of implementation. Parties must also avoid dangerous distractions such as “nature-based solutions”.
- Finance Just Transition
COP30 must recognise that designing and delivering just transition policies requires dedicated resources.
Finance must be new, additional, grant-based, public, adequate, predictable, and non-debt-creating – in line with countries’ fair shares and legal obligations.
- Integration of Just Transition Plans into NDCs, NAPs, and LT-LEDS
Countries should embed just transition actions in their official climate planning documents, aligning long-term development and climate goals with social justice and equity.
- National Institutions for Workers and Peoples’ Participation
Governments must establish robust and inclusive consultation and participation institutions and processes in planning and decision making processes at the national, regional and local level – with on the one hand tripartite social dialogue involving government, employers and workers to shape labour policies, and on the other hand engagement with rights-holders and relevant stakeholders on all other aspects of Just Transition.
Climate action must work for people, not against them.
Done right, a Just Transition leads us to decent jobs, secure livelihoods, food and energy sovereignty, safer communities, and a liveable future for all. Ignored, it becomes the next excuse for delay, exclusion, and corporate capture.
We stand united – unions, Indigenous leaders, feminists, youth, environmentalists, and working-class movements – in a common demand for justice and transformation, for action that matches the scale of the crisis and the dignity of those living through it.
Let COP30 in Belém be remembered as the moment the world chose fairness over failure – when governments proved that multilateralism can still deliver for people and the planet.
For more information and media requests:
For more information and media requests:
Tomas Spragg Nilsson, Senior Communications Officer, CAN Europe, +46 707 65 63 92
Jani Savolainen, Senior Communications Coordinator, CAN Europe, jani.savolainen@caneurope.org // +358 504 66 78 31
