The decision-making body established by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the Conference of the Parties (COP), meets for its 30th conference in Belém, Brazil from 10 - 21 November 2025.

COP30 President, Ambassador André Corrêa do Lago, notes, "Just transitions are central for leveraging climate action towards sustainable development and addressing structural inequalities between and within countries, including in terms of gender, race, and ethnicity."

A normative consensus around the need for a just transition is building. At COP27, the Just Transition Work Programme (JTWP) was established and several just transition initiatives have emerged at the multilateral and national levels. However, the proliferation of just transition initiatives has been fragmented and uneven. To address this fragmentation, the Climate Action Network (CAN) has proposed the Belém Action Mechanism for a Global Just Transition (BAM) as a "coherent, practical and actionable" institutional framework under the UNFCCC to coordinate and strengthen just transition efforts worldwide.

Civil society organisations, human rights bodies, Indigenous Peoples and resource-rich countries are calling for COP30 to recognise and integrate inequities in renewable energy value chains in its deliberations on a just transition. Colombia has proposed a binding minerals treaty, and will table a resolution to initiate negotiations at the UN Environment Assembly in December 2025. Over 200 civil society organisations have called on States Parties to the UNFCCC to strengthen energy transition minerals governance. The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Türk, noted that, while pursuing efforts to accelerate the energy transition is essential, "the extraction, processing and trade of critical energy transition minerals must be subject to human rights guardrails so the transition does not repeat the mistakes of the past".

This story follows developments relating to calls for justice and equity in energy transition value chains, including transition minerals governance, at COP30.