Just Transition and Human Rights | Reducing Dependence on New Mineral Resource Extraction | HRC59 Side Event

About this Event

There is growing recognition that a just transition provides a key framework for mitigating the impacts of climate change and achieving sustainable development.

The climate crisis poses great threats to ecosystems, economies, and societies worldwide, disproportionately affecting the communities in the most vulnerable situations. Those who have contributed the least to the crisis bear the brunt of its consequences. By integrating human rights principles into just transition processes, societies can build more inclusive and equitable pathways to sustainable development.

A just transition requires to manage the shift to a low-carbon, environmentally sustainable economy in a fair and inclusive way, ensuring that no one is left behind.

A just transition must be driven toward a circular economy, with cleaner technologies requiring fewer minerals and reducing demand in minerals. Then, circular economy policies are among the best ways for States to reduce reliance on newly mined minerals, such as lithium, cobalt, and nickel, because they enable States to keep these materials in use for as long as possible. They likewise offer a powerful tool for States to curb environmental destruction and human rights abuses linked to mining.

A just transition must focus on creating decent work opportunities, protecting workers’ rights, and addressing the social and economic impacts of climate action, particularly in regions and industries heavily reliant on fossil fuels.

This side event provided an opportunity for the UN Special Rapporteur on human rights and climate to share perspectives and exchange with other panelists.

Speakers

By order of intervention.

Elisa MORGERA

UN Special Rapporteur on climate change

Benjamin SCHACHTER

Coordinator, Environment and Climate Change Team, UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights

Moustapha Kamal GUEYE

Director, Priority action programme on just transitions, International Labour Organization

Bruna CAMPOS

Senior Campaigner, Offshore Oil & Gas, CIEL

Daniel URIBE

Lead Programme Officer, South Centre

Andrea CARMEN

Executive Director, International Indian Treaty Council (IITC)

Gabriel JOFRE

Werken (spokesperson), of the Malalweche Territorial Identity Organization of the Mapuche Indigenous People, from the province of Mendoza, Argentina (Video Message)

Yves LADOR

Representative of Earthjustice to the United Nations in Geneva | Moderator

Highlights

Video

Summary

Introduction: Towards a Human Rights-Based Just Transition

Elisa MORGERA | UN Special Rapporteur on human rights and climate change

• The search for critical minerals is systematically violating human rights worldwide, particularly on Indigenous territories, adding another layer of preventable harm to communities already among the most affected by climate change while still facing the legacy and continuation of human rights violations across generations tied to land use and extractive practices. Lowering or exempting critical mineral projects from environmental regulations under the justification of urgency in the just transition is deeply problematic, as skipping full life cycle environmental assessments risks worsening biodiversity loss, pollution, and climate impacts while missing crucial data needed to confirm whether these efforts truly reduce emissions or contribute further to greenhouse gas increases.
• Indigenous Peoples’ rights are misleadingly seen as obstacles in the search for critical minerals for climate action rather than being recognized as central to protecting everyone’s right to a healthy environment, with the destruction of their territories and disregard for their knowledge undermining conditions for Indigenous science to exist and evolve. This loss weakens the evidence base essential for effective climate action informed by a deeper understanding of planetary and human health interconnections that are critical to addressing the multiple crises faced globally.
• Current approaches to defossilization risk repeating the economic patterns that caused climate change, hiding within the push for critical minerals the same models that perpetuate crises, and may entrench a worsening trajectory rather than supporting a transformative and just transition. Fossil fuel lock-in remains embedded in the critical mineral transition, with continued reliance on coal-fired plants for recycling, increased use of fossil-fuel-based plastics in renewable energy and electric vehicles, and other less visible but persistent forms of fossil fuel dependence undermining the surface-level narrative of transition.
• Projections around the staggering amounts of critical minerals needed for the just transition require scrutiny regarding whose energy needs are being served and whether these projections align with transforming economic systems toward planetary health and climate crisis resolution. It is crucial to question whether current plans, such as the electric vehicle sector’s reliance on critical minerals, genuinely contribute to equitable, sustainable economic transformation or perpetuate systems driving climate change, inequality, and environmental degradation.
• The exponential growth of AI and data centers presents a growing energy and water footprint that requires examination regarding whether it aligns with advancing sustainable development goals and human rights or reinforces inequitable economic models and supports fossil fuel industries. Evidence shows AI-generated advertising contributes to disinformation around climate change and fossil fuels, demonstrating how these technologies can complicate efforts toward effective, fair climate action and economic transformation if their development and deployment are not critically assessed within the broader planetary and human rights context.

Panel Discussion

Benjamin SCHACHTER | Coordinator, Environment and Climate Change Team, UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights

• The Human Rights Council has actively focused on just transition as integral to climate action, with recent resolutions and discussions emphasizing that a just transition cannot occur without human rights at its core. The just transition should be understood as a comprehensive shift toward environmentally sustainable, equitable, and inclusive economies and societies that create decent work, reduce inequality and poverty, and uphold all human rights, including the right to a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment. Originating from labor union frameworks, just transition has evolved into an integrated justice framework across all countries, sectors, and both formal and informal economies, requiring transformation beyond the climate context to shift away from environmentally and socially destructive practices embedded in current economic paradigms toward sustainable alternatives.
• The Paris Agreement and other environmental agreements are essential components of just transition, and human rights must be embedded across all critical mineral value chains, as emphasized by the Secretary-General’s Critical Energy Transition Minerals Initiative, which has made human rights its first principle. The OHCHR and ILO have developed key messages emphasizing a whole-of-society transformation centered on social dialogue, equality, non-discrimination, and human rights within environmental and economic policy spaces, ensuring policies reflect these principles in broad contexts as well as specifically within the critical minerals transition.
• National policies should prioritize protecting the rights of those affected by the extraction and processing of transition minerals, with mechanisms for environmental and human rights impact assessments being critical. Business actors, including those in extractive industries, must avoid infringing on human rights and address adverse impacts following the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, while states must uphold Indigenous peoples’ rights, including their right to Free, Prior, and Informed Consent (FPIC) regarding lands, territories, and resources. Policies must also aim to equitably reduce unsustainable consumption and production while effective planning for just transition requires robust social dialogue, transparent processes, and meaningful stakeholder engagement.
• Ending impunity for attacks against environmental human rights defenders is essential, particularly within the extractive sector, and the just transition must be gender-transformative to ensure fair and equitable outcomes for all. Guidance and collaboration with states are underway to align transition policies with human rights obligations, illustrated through active work within the plastics treaty negotiations and climate negotiations, ensuring that shifts away from industries causing environmental harm do not negatively impact livelihoods while maintaining human rights considerations.
• The ongoing negotiations within the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Paris Agreement, including at Bonn and upcoming COP30 in Brazil, are crucial spaces where the inclusion and operationalization of human rights within just transition frameworks are being discussed. It is critical that these negotiations advance a coherent, human-rights-grounded vision of just transition, ensuring consistent understanding and implementation across UN bodies, so that just transition is not only acknowledged within human rights forums but integrated effectively into climate, environmental, and economic policymaking globally.

Moustapha Kamal GUEYE | Director, Priority action programme on just transitions, International Labour Organization

• The world’s growing reliance on renewables will inevitably increase demand for critical minerals, making it essential to focus not on reducing mining dependence outright but on ensuring that the exploitation of energy transition minerals occurs within an international regulatory framework to avoid unregulated bilateral dealings and to enable the application of consistent human rights, labor standards, and environmental protections globally.
• There is a need to prioritize a normative agenda ensuring that mineral exploration and exploitation respect international labor standards and human rights, including the elimination of child labor, forced labor, and discrimination, while promoting freedom of association, collective bargaining, and safe, healthy working conditions, particularly in mining sectors that are often dominated by informality and poor working conditions across Africa and other regions.
• Countries rich in critical minerals increasingly aim to move beyond merely supplying raw materials by developing local value chains, enterprise capacity, skills, and employment opportunities, requiring clear policies and support to integrate these nations into productive supply chains while promoting formalization within their economies to ensure that mineral wealth contributes to broad-based local development.
• As significant investments will continue to flow into critical mineral extraction, there is a pressing need to enforce responsible business conduct throughout the supply chain, aligning investment flows with social justice and decent work principles to prevent exacerbating existing deficits in the world of work while aligning economic gains with human and labor rights protections.
• Regulatory frameworks must actively support sustainability and just transition principles, recognizing that while the ecological transition will generate new opportunities, it will also create displacement and negative impacts, particularly affecting indigenous and tribal communities, requiring adherence to international conventions and guidelines such as ILO Convention 169 and the ILO’s Just Transition Guidelines to ensure equitable outcomes within the green transition.
• There is a critical need to maintain all mineral exploitation and trade within the realm of international regulatory frameworks, as political tensions and bilateral disputes risk undermining human rights and labor rights enforcement, making it imperative for normative agencies to retain leverage to safeguard workers, communities, and environmental standards throughout the transition to renewable energy dependency.

Bruna CAMPOS Senior Campaigner, Offshore Oil & Gas, CIEL

• The just transition encompasses all sectors of the economy, not only the energy sector, and while the current focus is on transitioning out of oil and gas, it is important to recognize that offshore oil and gas expansion continues, particularly in Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia, often impacting fragile marine ecosystems and communities dependent on a healthy ocean. These communities, including fisherfolk and Indigenous peoples, are already facing disproportionate harm, making it clear that any just transition must begin with phasing out fossil fuels while addressing existing human rights violations in areas where extraction has already occurred.
• Replacing the fossil fuel economy with large-scale mining for transition minerals risks replicating colonial, exploitative, and unequal systems of extraction, leading to land grabbing, violence against Indigenous peoples, environmental destruction, displacement, and loss of livelihoods. Fossil projects have historically treated frontline communities as expendable, leaving poisoned lands, polluted waters, and broken economies, and without systemic change, mineral extraction for the energy transition could perpetuate these injustices, particularly as many transition minerals extracted in the Global South primarily serve consumption in the Global North.
• Extracting resources from the seabed is not new, as the oil and gas industry has exploited the deep sea for decades with severe consequences, exemplified by disasters like the Deepwater Horizon, which left ecosystems like coral reefs unable to recover even a decade later. Extracting transition minerals from the deep sea similarly threatens the food web, Indigenous peoples’ rights to food and cultural traditions, and the livelihoods of coastal communities reliant on intact marine systems, while contributing to further degradation of already stressed oceans, as highlighted by the IPBES and IPCC.
• A rights-based just transition requires transforming not only what energy is produced but also how it is produced, distributed, and consumed, ensuring systems are aligned with people’s needs while reducing emissions equitably. This involves creating energy-efficient systems that lower emissions while reducing energy bills and improving air quality, shifting to circular economies that reduce demand for new extraction through durable product design, mandatory recycling targets, right-to-repair laws, and resilient supply chains, thereby decreasing reliance on both fossil fuels and transition minerals.
• Building a people-centered, decentralized, and smarter energy system is essential, enabling real-time monitoring, renewable integration, micro-grids, green communities, local energy ownership, and participatory energy governance, while also addressing the need to reduce overall energy consumption. This decentralization is particularly challenging in regions with centralized grids, but it is critical for a meaningful energy transition that prioritizes community resilience, participation, and the reduction of structural inequalities within energy systems.
• A truly just transition must be grounded in human rights, requiring free, prior, and informed consent for all projects, ensuring that if consent is not given, projects cannot proceed, and requiring structures that enable public participation, access to justice, participation in public affairs, and reparations for communities. Establishing FPIC is often neglected, and without these processes, transitions risk violating rights rather than upholding them, perpetuating patterns of harm seen in the oil and gas industry.
• Addressing legacy harms from oil and gas operations, such as flaring, excessive exploration, and environmental degradation, is necessary for a human rights-based transition, requiring accountability, remediation, reparations, and redress for affected communities. Governments must integrate human rights into policy through due diligence measures, environmental impact assessments, and corporate sustainability directives, building on existing frameworks like the EU Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive, Norway’s transparency law, and South Africa’s reporting requirements to advance a genuinely just transition.
• Enabling communities to monitor, participate, and ensure accountability is critical, using citizen science and participatory monitoring to track whether cleanups and transition commitments are genuinely fulfilled, as exemplified by community monitoring efforts in Nigeria that reveal discrepancies between reported and actual cleanup progress. A truly just transition must center dignity, repair past harms, prevent future violations, and place the most affected communities at the heart of decision-making, ensuring the transition away from fossil fuels does not replicate the injustices and environmental destruction of the past.

Daniel URIBE | Lead Programme Officer, South Centre

• A just transition is not only about climate change mitigation but also addresses environmental degradation, poverty, and displacement while centering human rights within climate action. It is essential to facilitate just transition processes through the Human Rights Council, which plays a crucial role in supporting states, ensuring that climate action upholds principles of fairness, inclusivity, and equity while promoting social justice and environmental sustainability as core pillars.
• Beyond protecting workers’ rights, a just transition requires promoting social dialogue at national and international levels to enable participation of multiple actors in shaping climate action and the energy transition. It is vital to ensure the equitable distribution of both the benefits and burdens of the energy transition, preventing further harm to historically marginalized and vulnerable communities. Fostering community participation is essential, allowing communities to actively engage in decision-making processes and ensuring that the transition reflects their needs, priorities, and perspectives while allowing them to share in the benefits.
• Systemic reform is needed as the energy transition impacts essential services, inclusive trade, and private financing structures. A significant burden lies in the climate finance deficit, where states require resources to fulfill climate obligations while also funding social services, often leading to reliance on debt-based financing rather than grants. This creates a “climate debt trap,” where increasing debt obligations to pursue climate goals can compromise the protection of social rights and social imperatives, highlighting a structural deficiency in the current system.
• Financing mechanisms for the energy transition exhibit asymmetry, with heavy investment in certain services but insufficient investment to offset the social costs of the transition. Significant investment is needed for the transition, but this can lead to a lowering of regulatory standards to attract investment, creating risks such as strengthened rights for investors through ISDS (Investor-State Dispute Settlement) mechanisms. These mechanisms constrain state sovereignty and regulatory autonomy, making states cautious in implementing necessary climate and human rights regulations due to the threat of disputes with foreign investors, particularly affecting developing countries.
• The balance between corporate profitability and state regulatory autonomy is critical, as these barriers place states in a challenging position of managing human rights obligations alongside obligations under international investment and trade agreements. The costs associated with ISDS disputes and protective measures often strain state budgets, impacting resources needed to support climate action and uphold human rights obligations, thereby complicating the implementation of effective, rights-based climate action.
• Despite these systemic challenges, some developing countries are actively advancing just transition initiatives. South Africa has developed a transition framework mapping coal phase-out strategies while engaging affected communities and aligning energy transition with labor transition. India’s Suryamitra program builds solar energy skills within the workforce, creating a safety net for workers as the transition progresses. Colombia’s energy communities empower local renewable energy generation by enabling communities to develop and manage their own energy projects, fostering community-centered development and climate resilience.
• Systemic change for a just transition requires prioritizing grant-based finance mechanisms over debt-based financing to ensure effective climate finance while reducing the risks of climate debt traps. It is also necessary to eliminate or limit the use of ISDS systems within the context of the energy transition to protect regulatory space for human rights and climate action. Supporting local models and community-based approaches will ensure that transition efforts align with local needs and realities, making climate action more inclusive, sustainable, and equitable while reinforcing community empowerment within the global just transition framework.

Andrea CARMEN | Executive Director, International Indian Treaty Council

• Free, prior, and informed consent is the recognized minimum standard under the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples regarding any development on Indigenous lands, including development framed as climate mitigation, biodiversity, and conservation projects, not only extractive industries like oil and coal. This is a state obligation that is frequently ignored, as seen in the lithium triangle in Argentina, where Indigenous communities continue to face violations of their rights with no FPIC being implemented in projects justified as part of the “green transition.”
• The extraction of so-called transition minerals such as lithium, when carried out in the same exploitative manner as traditional mining in Indigenous territories without FPIC, cannot be considered a just transition for Indigenous peoples. In Sonora, Mexico, exploratory lithium mining under “Plan Sonora” is displacing Indigenous communities, including the Yaqui and Opata and peoples, through forced relocations for railroads to facilitate lithium transport to the United States, a project jointly announced by the US and Mexico at COP28 under the banner of climate mitigation, despite no consent or even basic consultation with affected communities.
• Indigenous peoples globally, including those in the United States, are experiencing the impacts of transition mineral extraction in the same way as communities in the Global South, regardless of their location or formal recognition by state governments. Over half of transition mineral reserves are on or near Indigenous lands, yet many Indigenous peoples lack legal land tenure or are not recognized, exacerbating the risks of exploitation and dispossession under the energy transition narrative.
• In the United States, transition mineral projects are being fast-tracked under the justification of national security, bypassing standard permitting processes and overriding Indigenous opposition. For instance, the Thacker Pass lithium mine in Nevada was approved within a year despite protests from Indigenous peoples and environmental groups, with water-intensive operations consuming billions of gallons annually, highlighting the dismissal of Indigenous resistance and the prioritization of mineral extraction over Indigenous rights and environmental sustainability.
• There is a concerning push to expand nuclear power and uranium mining as part of low-carbon energy transitions, with abandoned and contaminated sites on Navajo lands in the United States being targeted for reactivation under green energy plans, further endangering Indigenous communities already burdened by historical contamination and environmental injustices.
• In the lithium triangle of Argentina, Chile, and Bolivia, Indigenous leaders report the complete depletion of clean groundwater due to lithium mining, with mining companies themselves considering withdrawal due to water scarcity while Indigenous communities face the existential threat of having no water for survival, illustrating the severe and irreversible consequences of unregulated extraction in the name of climate action, leaving Indigenous peoples with nothing as the transition minerals industry collapses under its own unsustainable practices.

Gabriel JOFRE | Werken (spokesperson) of the Malalweche Territorial Identity Organization of the Mapuche Indigenous People, from the province of Mendoza, Argentina (Video Message)

• In the name of the energy transition away from fossil fuels, extractive methods continue to advance, exploiting and abusing the resources provided by Mother Earth and nature, causing direct attacks on Indigenous territories while also subjecting Indigenous populations to judicial harassment, hate campaigns, stigmatization, political persecution, and attempts at criminalization simply for wanting to continue living in their territories, improving quality of life, and advocating for a pluralistic, distributive, intercultural, and egalitarian society.
• Protecting the gathering of all lives in Wallmapu, the Mapuche territory, is a mandate rooted in ancestral knowledge, carried not only for the benefit of Indigenous peoples but for all of society and everyone who wishes to live sustainably on this planet, emphasizing that Indigenous peoples are not a problem to be managed but part of a much-needed solution to the climate and environmental crises facing the world today.
• The extreme situation facing the planet requires collective awareness, unity, and a commitment to finding answers together, recognizing that there is no shared, sustainable horizon unless all voices, all ways of thinking, all elements of nature, and all forces of nature are taken into account within the solutions we seek.
• A genuine commitment from everyone is necessary to generate real solutions that involve active participation, ensuring that solutions to the climate and ecological crises are inclusive and allow each person and community to be part of building a sustainable and just future for all.

Photo Gallery

Documents

• Presentations made during the event

Links

• Environment @ 59th Session of the UN Human Rights Council
• Geneva Rights and Climate Talks
• Human Rights, Climate Change, and the Role of Geneva