"We Want a Just Transition, Not Just a Transition": JTA's 2025 Year-in-Review Audio Highlights

From UN conference halls to the streets, this episode amplifies audio highlights of the intersectional, interdependent, transborder, and multilingual advocacy of peoples and groups moving toward just transition in 2025. Listen to sound bites from INC-5.2 in Geneva, Switzerland, where Global Plastics Treaty negotiations took place. We also share audio from Bonn, Germany, during the intersessional leading up to COP30, and from Belém, Brazil, during the IV International Meeting of People Affected by Dams and the Climate Crisis, the Peoples’ Summit opening plenary of the Just, Popular, and Inclusive Transition axis, the Global Day of Action for Climate Justice, and the UN Climate Summit. Don't miss the origin story of 'just transition'; testimony demonstrating the inseparability of decolonization, demilitarization, and climate justice; analysis on the creation of the Just Transition Mechanism within the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change; and more! The episode concludes with JTA Executive Director José T. Bravo in New Orleans, Louisiana, USA, where JTA joined with Taproot Earth and other groups during the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. 

The voices featured in this year-in-review episode are many. Listen to Aakaluk Blatchford, Tom Goldtooth, and Chief Ninawa Huni Kui, with the Indigenous Environmental Network, Francisco Kelvim Nobre da Silva, of the Movimiento de Afectados por Represas/Movimento dos Atingidos por Barragens, Rachitaa Gupta, with the Global Campaign to Demand Climate Justice, and JTA's José T. Bravo, Nona Chai, Fernando Tormos-Aponte, and Lara Aumann. Thank you to the many aligned peoples and groups we move alongside toward just transition!  

The inspiration for this episode's quoted title comes from JTA Policy Lead Fernando Tormos-Aponte, who expressed, "We want a just transition, not just a transition," during a decolonization and demilitarization side-event panel at COP30.

Audio clips from Lara Aumann, Aakaluk Blatchford, Tori Cress, Mónica Flores Hernández, Dylan Kava, Tyler Norman, Fernando Tormos-Aponte, United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, and World Animal Protection

Podcast edited and produced by Catalina de Onís

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Transcript

Catalina de Onís:
Hello, and welcome to the Just Transition Alliance Podcast. This show centers the experiences, insights, and demands of frontline workers and fenceline communities united for justice.

José T. Bravo:
I think we all have a kinship to our Mother Earth and we can 't forget that. And we have to understand that who we are and what we are and what we're struggling for is the right thing to do. If it was not the right thing to do, there would not be any push back.

Catalina de Onís:
That's our executive director, José T. Bravo, speaking during New York City Climate Week in September 2025. I'm Catalina de Onís, the Communications and Training Associate at the Just Transition Alliance, or JTA. In this first episode of 2026, we provide audio highlights from our work last year. Listen in for sound bites from New Orleans, marking the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, and INC-5.2  in Geneva, where Global Plastics Treaty negotiations took place. We also have audio from Bonn, during the intersessional leading up to COP30, and we were on the ground in Belém, Brazil, for the UN Climate Summit. You'll hear sounds from the Peoples' Summit opening plenary of the Just, Popular, and Inclusive Transition axis, the origin story of just transition, and analysis on the creation of the Just Transition Mechanism within the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. All right, let's turn to these 2025 remotivating remarks, as we move toward the ongoing, intersectional just transition struggle.

Lara Aumann:
My name is Lara, and I'm with the Just Transition Alliance. We're here at INC-5.2 in Geneva to demand an equitable Global Plastics Treaty that protects the rights of Indigenous Peoples, waste pickers, communities of color, working-class  communities, youth, and future generations to come. This should be an intergenerational decision-making process. However, we are being excluded not only from making interventions, but in meaningfully engaging in this process. As we approach the final days of negotiations, we demand that this treaty is created with us and for us and implements a just transition that addresses the full impact cycle of plastics. We're here. The time is now, we demand to be heard.

Aakaluk Blatchford:
Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining us here today. My name is Aakaluk. In English, Adrienne. I'm from Unalakleet, Alaska, and I am here representing Just Transition Alliance, along with Indigenous Environmental Network. I want to thank each and every one of you for taking time out of your day to attend and to listen with your open hearts and open minds and take these messages from this room and share them onto the hearts of decision makers, who can create an equitable treaty for all, where we can live life to its fullest without having to worry about plastic pollution and plastic colonization. Not only in the world, but for future generations, of those children that we have yet to know their names.

Group Chant:
What do we want? Just transition! When do we want it? Now! What do we want? Just transition! When do we want it now?

Rachitaa Gupta:
Welcome to this press conference organized by sister alliance and Global Campaign to Demand Climate Justice. In this press conference, the Indigenous and frontline participants will share what are the key political questions that are looming over the SBSTA [Subsidiary Body for Scientific and Technological Advice] 62 in Bonn. With the US out of the Paris Agreement, increased global conflict and militarism and new false solutions, climate talks continue to be a contentious space of geopolitical negotiating. Indigenous and frontline participants are tackling key political questions looming over SBSTA 62 in Bonn, Germany. While providing an overview from the negotiations on areas including carbon markets, just transition, our powerful panel also aims to highlight what to expect on the road to COP 30 in Belém. We'll now start  with Tom Goldtooth from Indigenous Environmental Network.

Tom Goldtooth:
Wow. I've been on this journey since 1998 at COP4, and seeing all the history of confusion, chaos, lack of action. But the UNFCCC is failing, failing Indigenous Peoples. It's a crisis of CO2 and climate colonialism as the world confronts escalating climate breakdown, violence, and militarization. The UNFCCC stands at a pivotal junction, not just in technical negotiations that you see here at the SB 62, but in its entire ethical and political foundations. We are witnessing negotiations by the governmental parties, especially by the wealthy countries, entrenching climate inaction, desperately repackaging the continuance of colonial structures and capital logics into a fossil fuel business-as -usual and a finance- as- usual UN conference that's failing Indigenous Peoples on many multiple fronts. As Indigenous Peoples, we know the land does not and never has recognized colonial borders. Neither does the wind, neither does the rivers and the oceans, neither does climate collapse. Our communities are being displaced not by migration, but by extraction, by false solutions that privatize land and land takings by corporations and by war and greed. Our Indigenous Environmental Network and our local and global movement building with Indigenous Peoples and non-Indigenous Peoples are clear what our fenceline and frontline communities have long known. Wall Street investment banks and global financial institutions are complicit in the climate crisis. Despite their greenwashing and false promises, these banks continue to bankroll the expansion of the fossil fuel polluters and the false solutions that deepen climate injustice, land grabbing, and human rights abuse. From carbon markets to carbon offsets to carbon capture and sequestration to solar radiation modification, and to many other geoengineering techno fixes, these schemes are distractions from the real solution that is rooted in Indigenous sovereignty, Indigenous Traditional Knowledge, land and oceans defense, and a just  energy transition away from an extractive capitalism and fossil fuel economy. Our lands and waters are not sacrifice zones, and our peoples are not collateral damage. So we are organizing. We are organizing within many movements to protect the sacredness of Mother Earth and Father Sky, not for profit, but for life. Thank you.

Rachitaa Gupta:
Thank you. We'll now hear from Chief Ninawa Huni Kui from Foundation Inu and the Indigenous Environmental Network.

Chief Ninawa Huni Kui: 
[In Portuguese, with English interpretation.] Good morning. I want to thank the press that is here today and also thank and to raise up the voices of the communities that are not able to be here in this space. Just to reaffirm what my brother Tom just said. There’s no climate justice without the full participation of the peoples who are being affected in the territories. The Presidency of the COP30 has this opportunity to change the perspectives of these conferences and to make the effort to make a real change to protect life in the territories.

Rachitaa Gupta:
Thank you so much, Chief. We'll now hear from [Francisco] Kelvim Nobre da Silva, from Cumbre de los Pueblos and MAB [Movimento dos Atingidos por Barragens]. 

Francisco Kelvim Nobre da Silva:
We are building a process of convergence through the Peoples' Summit, and now we have more than 8,000 organizations around the world in that process. We believe that the center of the discussion to face climate crisis has to be the people. We believe there is no climate justice without human rights. We believe there is no just transition without participation. It is why we have to confront the corporate power. The Peoples' Summit is autonomous, independent, and popular space with an inside and outside strategy of advocacy and struggle. We invite the people, the people of the world to change this story with us, to change the history of climate at COP 30. Yes, it is possible with a process of mobilization, and it's why we are building uh the Peoples' Summit, not just in Brazil, but around the world, with this process of mobilization, struggles at the countries, with a strategy that goes inside these structures of UNFCCC, but outside at the streets of Brazil and the streets of our countries. Thank you.

Rachitaa Gupta:
Thank you so much, Kelvim, for sharing that. We'll now hear from our last speaker, Fernando Tormos-Aponte, from Just Transition Alliance.

Fernando Tormos-Aponte:
Thank you. We are here to continue to advance the principle of just transition, which is the idea that thriving environments and economic well-being are not mutually exclusive. As organizations and movements working in the space of just transition, to advance a just transition for more than 30 years, it is quite frustrating that we are told that we need  further reviews, mapping of existing institutions, and that this is not the adequate venue to advance a just transition. Our movements and communities have been engaged in lengthy deliberations, building alignment, spending time to understand how the current systems harm people and advance new systems in which people can thrive. It is time to phase in the real solutions and phase out harmful systems. The lack of progress in these negotiations is not due to a lack of ideas or a lack of civil society leadership. Civil society groups are here demonstrating greater alignment and agreement, and most importantly, sending a clear message about the urgency to finalize a just transition decision this year. We're concerned about the inclusion of false solutions, such as nature-based solutions, in the negotiations, and the continued reliance on forms of finance that plunge communities into greater debt. We're concerned about proposals to remove human rights from the decision text. Lastly, we are told that there can be no new institutions or funding that focus on just transition, that these are too costly, and that there are too many institutions already. And that these discussions of funding belong in negotiations about financing where nature continues to be commodified. What this tells us is that some nations will only support new institutions or financing insofar as they advance their geopolitical interests and that they are not genuinely engaged in efforts to advance real solutions to climate change. How can new institutions or just transition funding be too costly when we know that fossil fuels are subsidized by more than one trillion dollars per year? If anybody needs to look for funding for a just transition, they know where to look. Thank you. Meanwhile, they set up new fossil solutions and new carbon markets. We come here and we're told there's no leadership. Meanwhile, you see the leadership. We come here and we're excluded. Meanwhile, they're negotiating our rights on our behalf. This is time for action. We've been fighting for a just transition for decades. We are involved in the deliberations and in the dialogues. That is where we can bring the knowledge into these negotiations. Bring that knowledge into the forefront. Bring this leadership into the forefront. It is time for our inclusion and our participation. It is time for action. We are told that there is need for more reviews, more mapping of institutions. Where we've been here for decades now, and still no action on just transition. We're told we don't have solutions. And yet we are proposing here a solution. It is a just transition, and it is backed by alignment across all of our constituencies. The time for action is now. The proposals are on the table. We need to act. Thank you.

Nona Chai:
Hi, this is Nona Chai with the Just Transition Alliance, and I'm here at the Fourth International Meeting of the Movement of People Affected by Dams. And you just really need to be here in order to experience how brilliant this is. This is a level of international organizing that really touches my heart and inspires me, and I think should inspire others to keep building movements bigger, deeper, and wider to create an international solidarity that is truly capable of achieving the systems change that we need. We need an inclusive just transition for frontline workers, fenceline communities, affected peoples, Indigenous Peoples, and we need it now. Please do look into the work of the Movement of People Affected by Dams. They are an amazing, amazing group. And stay tuned for more updates, JTA's in Belém, for the next two to three weeks.

Fernando Tormos-Aponte:
[Visit the JTA YouTube page to view a  video of this speech with Spanish-language captions: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/zdkc9dbjI6Y.]

Nona Chai:
My name is Nona Chai, and I'm representing the Just Transition Alliance, an organization with an early and historic role in developing the concept of just transition. I'm here to remind us where the concept came from and what it means. The idea of just transition came from Tony Mazzocchi, the late former Secretary Treasurer of the Oil Chemical and Atomic Workers Union, in the early '90s. Mazzocchi realized that the chemicals, fuels, and weapons that workers were using were far too dangerous to be on the face of the planet, and that the transition away from fossil fuels is inevitable. So he built a Super fund for Workers, which involves four years full pay and benefits, plus free tuition. And in 1995, the name changed from Superfund for Workers to Just Transition. It's important to remember that just transition goes beyond labor. It promotes crucial links of solidarity with other movements. Indigenous Environmental Network created the Indigenous Principles of Just Transition.

Fernando Tormos-Aponte:
Thank you, Marissa [Reyes], for uplifting our struggle in Puerto Rico. I'm also from Puerto Rico. I'm Fernando Tormos-Aponte, policy lead for the Just Transition Alliance. I want to make the link between militarism and colonialism and say that, for those of us who have been fighting for a just transition, militarism is not just obstructing a just transition. It's also a tool for enabling the continuity of fossil fuel and extraction-based economies and political systems. In Puerto Rico, after kicking out the US Navy in a fight that united the most unlikely allies, the US is remilitarizing and occupying the archipelago. Now it is when the US is staging its attacks on our Caribbean and South American allies. Political and military control is only one form of colonialism. I also want to turn our attention to other forms. Colonialism is also about who has the power to create knowledge. Colonialism is the system that convinces the oppressed, that they are unable to create knowledge, to forge solutions, to care for ourselves, and to govern ourselves. Colonial knowledge creation enabled the creation of false solutions as the only way to address the climate crisis. It continues to this day. Colonialism is also a system of financial control. Debt is a racialized system of colonial extraction and control. In Puerto Rico, debt was issued for clientelistic spending that sustained the power of global enablers of colonialism. Debt is the reason we are told we cannot develop reliable infrastructures that sustain life,  like food, water, energy, and health systems. We are made to think that the only way to develop these infrastructures is to get into even more debt. That each person should only take care of themselves. Our systems of collective care have been dismantled. Some are now mourning the loss of democracy in the United States. But for Indigenous Peoples, for Puerto Ricans, and for the marginalized, we never experienced that so-called democracy. In Puerto Rico, more than 4,000 households adopt rooftop solar systems each month. This is among the world's fastest rates of renewable energy adoption. You might wonder how did they do it? Debt and minerals getting extracted from the lands of our allies. This is unsustainable. The company that held most of that debt for solar panels in Puerto Rico just went bankrupt. It is a bankrupt system. It is a forced  transition. An extractive system created climate change and extreme weather forced us into this transition. And in the process, it has taken the lives of so many of our relatives. Meanwhile, Global North countries in these negotiations keep stalling, saying that we need more dialogue and more evaluation. This transition was forced and failed us. This system failed us. We call for no more debt. We need direct, non-debt creating funding for just transition. We need a participatory democracy of all affected groups. We need a just transition, not just a transition. Not a forced transition, not a militarized transition, not a transition at the expense of our livelihood and future. We don't have a scarcity of resources. We have an unequal distribution of resources. We don't have a scarcity of knowledge. We have a systematic denial of the value of our knowledge. We need a just transition, not just a transition. Our solidarity will deliver it. Thank you.

Panel Moderator:
We're going to now turn to Nona Chai of the Just Transition Alliance, who's going to talk about just transition developments here.

Nona Chai:
I am Nona Chai from the Just Transition Alliance and the Global Campaign to Demand Climate Justice. I want to declare that I have no direct ties to the fossil fuel industry or other emissions-intensive industries and no conflicts of interest. We can continue with business as usual and create our own destruction, or we can co-create a society where those most harmed lead on decisions that impact them, where Indigenous Traditional practices, clean, safe workplaces, and local regenerative economies provide and thrive. We need to stop the real and physical violence against Indigenous Peoples and affected communities. We need a just transition that cares for all. When the UAE Just Transition Work Programme was first established, we were among the many who saw its broad scope agreed to by parties as a promising development. A just transition cannot be possible without recognizing the different dimensions and challenges faced by workers, Indigenous Peoples, and communities in the transition away from fossil fuels, especially in developing countries. This includes poverty eradication, sustainable development, adapting to the impacts of climate change, and protecting and empowering all vulnerable and affected workers, Indigenous Peoples, communities, and sectors. The scope of the UAE JTWP was not only broad enough to address these issues, but also laid the foundations for developing concrete outcomes and actions for people on the ground. However, since its establishment, the JTWP has yet to deliver on its promise. It has become bogged down in endless debate, grandstanding and poor facilitation. DCJ believes that this is a make or break year for just transition in the UNFCCC. Another COP without actionable decisions on just transition will render the JTWP into a permanent talk shop not worth renewing after it expires in 2026. Either the JTWP fulfills its promise or it becomes another failed work stream obstructing the international response to climate crisis. We strongly welcome the G77 adoption of the proposal to establish a Just Transition Mechanism very similar to civil society's proposal for a Belém Action Mechanism that aims to achieve a holistic just transition across the whole economy within and between countries. The G77's mechanism proposal incorporates many of the functions of the BAM that we, including DCJ, have been arguing for coordination of just transition initiatives within and outside the UNFCCC, supporting action and provision of technical assistance and MOI for implementing just transitions, especially in the Global South, and knowledge sharing and creation. This mechanism can serve as a space to initiate action on all dimensions of just transition, including energy transition, critical minerals, food and agricultural systems, care work, and others. But where is the Global North's ambition for establishing necessary institutional arrangements? The Global North is failing to support a new institutional mechanism for fear of overlap and administrative costs. The world needs the Global North to step up and fund a non-debt creating just transition in order to break historical patterns of harm. Because of climate change, the cost for states and billions of displaced and affected workers, Indigenous Peoples, communities will continue to rise. We are witnessing this with the increasing frequency and intensity of "natural" disasters, including in Haiti, Jamaica, Cuba, Alaska, Egypt, and the Philippines, and more. We cannot allow more lives, livelihoods, and species to be lost. The Global North claims that a mechanism already exists and that just transition is in everything. However, the popularization of just transition does not ensure its success. And mainstreaming just transition across all UNFCCC mechanisms does not preclude parties from creating a dedicated home for just transition. We need a powerful and inclusive institutional center to create focus, clarify definitions, and distribute resources for just transition. Most importantly, this mechanism must create the conditions for a principled and just transition away from extractive economies and a fossil fuel phase-out. We urge all parties to ensure that the mechanism is both guided by principles that protect and promote the rights of all sectors and includes the formal representation of observer constituencies in the UNFCCC and civil society. There can be no just transition without the leadership and agency of workers, Indigenous Peoples, communities, youth, and all affected sectors. Furthermore, DCJ is calling for the removal of language on nature-based solutions in the current informal note of the JTWP that would be the basis of a COP decision. NBS is often used as an umbrella term covering a range of schemes for climate and biodiversity protection. The concept is so vague that it has also referred to various false solutions that violate the rights and territories of Indigenous Peoples and communities, as well as destroying ecosystems. As our colleagues at Friends of the Earth have said, NBS is a wolf in sheep's clothing, a dangerous idea in disguise. Just transition decisions must enshrine the collective rights of Indigenous Peoples, which include but are not limited to UNDRIP and ILO Convention 169. DCJ joins the growing chorus of movements rejecting all false climate solutions. There can be no just transition with false solutions. Just transition can only be with real solutions such as agroecology and locally governed food systems. A just transition must recognize and ensure the implementation of the rights of peasants and other people working in rural areas as recognized in the United Nations Declaration UNDROP. We have the solutions. Let's follow paths laid by Principles of Environmental Justice, the Jemez principles for Democratic Organizing, the Bali Principles of Climate Justice, and the Indigenous Principles of Just Transition, well-established documents within the environmental justice movement. Let's co-create a future where everyone can thrive. Thank you.

Fernando Tormos-Aponte:
Thank you all for supporting the work we've been doing in the past three weeks. We started this off with supporting the launching of the Movement for Folks Affected by Dams and led that into the Peoples' Summit. We drafted and co-drafted a declaration on just transition and supported the work of developing Peoples' Summit Declaration. What we saw in that space was that there is broad transnational grassroots movement-generated support and visions for just transition. That was a powerful force that we brought into the UNFCCC, where we demanded that those visions be recognized, respected, and implemented through policy. In this space, we've experienced some exclusions where parties are not necessarily entertaining the visions that emerge from those grassroots spaces, and we're putting pressure on, we've been putting pressure on them to do so. Today we learned that there may be the establishment of a Mechanism on Just Transition, which is something that we've joined our allies in demanding. We see this as an opportunity to create an institutional home within the UNFCCC to coordinate just transition policies, to make sure that no one is left behind, to make sure that knowledge is valued, not just traditional uh scientific knowledge, but the Traditional Ancestral Knowledge of Indigenous Peoples and the knowledge that our allies gain on the front lines of climate change. So we'll continue pursuing this, and there's much more much room to approve this decision that was released today. For instance, the text now dropped references to critical minerals, which we know is a priority for our Indigenous Peoples' allies and those who are in the front lines of climate change and whose lands are being impacted in the name of green colonialism. We want a just transition that shifts away from extractive logics of development, and we want a just transition that compensates those who are negatively impacted by this transition away from fossil fuels. We'll continue to pressure for that in this space. We thank you all for the support. We're really excited to see a global movement for something we've been fighting for for so long. So we'll continue to give up dates as this moves forward. Thank you all for supporting.

José T. Bravo:
What is the solution, right? The solution has to come from you all. Because you're the ones that have to be able to say what you want in your communities, how you want that system to be, and what it needs to look like, and who needs to run it, right? We're asking labor right now to think out of the box, too. We want, in collective bargaining contracts, we want the companies to commit...because the companies can walk away scot-free and everybody else is left holding the bag. So, if you put, in your collective bargaining contracts, that the company has to put in resources because eventually something might happen, it probably will...it needs to be there, and it needs to be guaranteed because, if not, then other folks are going to be trying to figure out where these just transition funds come from. And you are going to look for just transition money, they have to be redirected. Some of the billions of dollars of subsidies that these companies get for free. That's our money that they get for free. Redirecting those resources. And at the same time, if they're going to put money forth, it has to be from profits. Because if it's not from profits, it'll raise the price of products. Right? And then everybody's gonna turn against you because they're paying more for something. But what you want to chase is their profits.

Group Chant:
No justice! No peace! No justice! No peace! No justice! No peace!

Catalina de Onís: 
Thank you so much for tuning into this first episode of 2026, featuring an audio year-in-review for 2025. We hope you'll join us for future recordings of the Just Transition Alliance Podcast. Follow us on Facebook, Bluesky, and Instagram with the @jtalliance handle. We also regularly update our blog at jtalliance.org. I'm JTA Communications and Training Associate Catalina de Onís. Let's keep up the fight for and with frontline workers and fenceline communities united for justice. Until next time!