PEOPLE’S DECLARATION FOR A RAPID, EQUITABLE, AND JUST TRANSITION FOR A FOSSIL-FREE FUTURE
I. The Global Context
A. Geopolitics of Aggression and Destruction, Fossil Dependence, and the Oil, Gas, and Energy Crisis
All acts of invasion, aggression and occupation are profoundly reprehensible and condemnable for the resulting massive loss of lives, displacement of people, intensification of human suffering and precarity, extreme disregard for human rights, devastation of vital infrastructures, eco-cide, the systematic flouting of international law, and the violation of national sovereignty.
We are issuing this declaration in the midst of US-Israel geopolitics of destruction, supported and enabled by other Global North countries. While the US and Israeli governments are not the only ones that are guilty of acts of war and aggression against other nations and peoples, theirs are primarily defining the global situation today. The US and Israel are responsible for military attacks against Iran, Venezuela, Lebanon, the illegal blockade of Cuba and the ongoing and devastating genocide against Palestine. They are responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths, needless climate and environmental pollution, and the destruction of civilian infrastructure- schools, hospitals, homes and cultural sites. The multilateral system is being heavily undermined, and the erosion of multilateralism poses a grave threat to the rights of peoples everywhere. All to maintain a world order where a US-led imperial alliance can maintain global control of resources and the world economy. A world order which maintains the impunity and profits of billionaires and corporations while the peoples of the world pay the price.
The US-Israel-led conflicts have also both catalyzed and exacerbated a global oil, gas and energy crisis. The resulting volatility in oil and gas prices reverberates through the global economy, inflating the costs of energy, fertilisers, food, transport, and essential services. These systemic shocks are borne disproportionately by the working class, impoverished communities, and the nations of the Global South. The US-led imperialist alliance is also attempting to lock in control of critical minerals for military and artificial intelligence, combat the control of China over mineral processing and maintain the current inequity in consumption of energy and resources.
The global oil, gas and energy crisis further exposes the inherent structural perils of fossil fuel dependency spanning energy, food systems, petrochemicals, and land use. Not only are fossil fuels the primary drivers of ecological collapse, they are fundamentally volatile, subject to geopolitical manipulation, and economically destabilizing. The crisis decisively deconstructs the persistent myth of fossil gas as a "transition fuel," revealing it instead as a perennial source of insecurity and conflict. The crisis also illuminates the profound injustices embedded in fossil fuel dependency, within the Global South and among marginalized peoples and communities in the Global North. Nations, peoples, and communities which have contributed minimally to global emissions, are now besieged by escalating living costs, climate-induced disasters, and energy insecurity.
The crisis is being exploited to justify the retrenchment of climate, energy, environmental and related fiscal and financial policies, including the expansion of coal and gas infrastructure and the suspension of phase-out commitments. This strategic backsliding deepens the climate emergency and ensures long-term ecological harm.
Many Global South nations remain trapped in post-colonial patterns: import dependency while producing specialty crops for export, fossil fuel dependency, and petrodollar exposure via policy regimes backed by International Financial Institutions (IFIs), export credit agencies, and bilateral development finance institutions, as well as private financial institutions and free trade agreements. These regimes are anchored in dollarized legacy contracts, sovereign guarantees, maximizing short term profits and shareholder returns and rigid capacity payments that externalize risk to the public while guaranteeing fossil fuel industry profits. These arrangements entrench costly fossil generation, exacerbate balance-of-payments pressures, and incentivize domestic fossil expansion, while austerity-driven frameworks systematically crowd out investment in distributed, alternative energy pathways.
There is a profound convergence between the corporations driving the climate catastrophe and those fueling global militarism. Imperialist powers operate in concert with fossil fuel giants to consolidate resource control and geopolitical influence; corporations such as Chevron, Total Energies, British Petroleum and Shell not only sustain the global war machine but also extract record profits from the resulting devastation.
Fossil fuel supply chains function essentially as warfare supply chains: commodity traders, refiners, insurers, and shipping firms profit from and facilitate military aggression, operating within a governance vacuum devoid of multilateral oversight. This phenomenon even extends beyond hydrocarbons. The escalating race for critical minerals demonstrates that unchecked corporate power—across both traditional and "green" extractivist industries—is increasingly fueling conflict and dispossession. The transition cannot be considered "just" if supply chains continue to sustain genocide, ecocide, and illegal occupation with undue impunity. Transnational corporations across all sectors are deeply complicit in the maintenance of militarism, colonialism, occupation, and imperialist wars.
State-level energy embargoes are systematically circumvented through corporate intermediaries, "flag-hopping," AIS (Automatic Identification System) manipulation, and third-country refining. These evasive tactics flourish because no binding international instrument currently exists to enforce such sanctions or hold corporate actors accountable.
We are in a period of massive transition, upheaval, and instability in the global capitalist system and the economic order. The economic, social, and environmental crisis is worsening people's living conditions and frustrating expectations of social improvements. In this period of instability and contestation, we are also seeing a rise of far-right, xenophobic, patriarchal forces mobilizing a politics of hate and fear around the world, many with neo-fascist characteristics. The advance of the extreme right, fascism and wars around the world exacerbates the climate crisis and the exploitation of peoples and nature.
B. Intensifying Climate Crisis and Escalating Impacts
The climate crisis continues to intensify, manifesting in escalating and compounding impacts across all global regions. These consequences are fundamentally unevenly distributed, exceedingly burdening rural areas, forest-dependent communities, coastal zones, migrants (including displaced, stateless, undocumented, asylee, and refugee people), Indigenous peoples’ territories, and ethnic or collective territories. In these locales, climate risks intersect with legacies of historical marginalization, racism and coloniality of power, sparse institutional presence, and constrained access to resources. The severity of these impacts is not uniform; within specific territories and among certain social sectors, the resulting loss and damage are significantly more acute, reflecting deep-seated structural inequities and vulnerabilities.
The frequency and severity of extreme weather events—including heatwaves, floods, droughts, storms, and wildfires—are accelerating at an alarming rate. Concurrently, eustatic sea-level rise poses an existential threat to entire communities and low-lying nations. These environmental shocks place unprecedented stress on agricultural systems, triggering widespread food insecurity and destabilizing hydrological cycles. As livelihoods are decimated, climate-induced displacements and migration continue to rise, accelerating the breakdown in regional stability.
The care economy absorbs much of this instability invisibly: as public services collapse and livelihoods are lost, women, girls and diversities are expected to act as shock absorbers through intensified unpaid labor in the home and community. This gendered division of labor must be eliminated, and care work, which remains unrecognized, unremunerated, and unsupported, must be rendered visible, valued and invested on and redistributed.
The Global South, alongside marginalized populations in the Global North, bears the primary brunt of the climate emergency despite having contributed nominally to its origins and its intensification today. This highlights systemic inequality at the core: the wealthiest 10% of the global population is responsible for nearly half of all emissions, while the poorest contribute a negligible share. This chasm between responsibility and vulnerability underscores the necessity of a justice-oriented approach to climate policy.
The intensification of cyclones, flooding, and salinity intrusion is actively eroding livelihoods, food and water systems, and social cohesion. Because workers, farmers and fishers, children and youth, women, migrants, Indigenous Peoples, Afrodescendants and marginalized groups are disproportionately impacted, any viable global response must prioritize their frontline experiences, ensuring that adaptation, resilience, loss-and-damage and just transition programs mechanisms are equitably and adequately financed and locally governed.
This crisis extends beyond economic metrics. It also drives irreversible non-economic losses—including the loss and displacement of lives and the erosion of culture, identity, traditional knowledge, and territorial ties which remain largely ignored in contemporary policy frameworks.
Air pollution from fossil fuels is one of the world’s leading causes of premature death and ill health, which places an enormous health economic burden. Moreover, the full picture of health harms from fossil fuels is probably underestimated due to lack of research on many relevant topics including: health harms from non-combustion aspects of the fossil fuel lifecycle (exploration, extraction, processing, transportation, and disposal, including offshore exploration, drilling, flaring, and oil spills as well as petrochemicals) with the largest impacts in Global South.
The IPCC’s Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5°C and the Sixth Assessment Working Group reports provide an undeniable scientific consensus regarding the urgency of the climate crisis and the irreversible harm associated with "overshoot"—the surpassing of the 1.5°C threshold. Current global policies are projected to result in a temperature increase of approximately 2.9°C, while existing Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), even if fully implemented, would only limit warming to 2.5–2.6°C. This trajectory exceeds the 1.5°C limit, highlighting a catastrophic gap between current commitments and the transformative action needed to prevent ecological collapse.
Furthermore, global climate strategies continue to ignore the massive emissions of industrial and animal agriculture. Driven by heavy fossil fuel dependency and standing as the single largest anthropogenic source of methane , this sector actively destabilizes the very hydrological cycles and food systems vulnerable communities rely upon.
II. Historical and Systemic Roots
A. Rooted in Capitalism, Colonialism, Racism, Patriarchy, Class and Caste Systems, Imperial Domination, and white “Supremacy”
The climate crisis, with fossil fuel dependence at its core, is fundamentally rooted in a global system rooted in Capitalism, Colonialism, Racism, Patriarchy, Class and Caste Systems, Imperial Domination, and white “Supremacy”which are characterized by inequality, exploitation, extraction, expropriation and extermination. The ascent of capitalism and settler colonialism in the Global North and subsequent colonial conquest and occupation of the Global South led to a global system defined by the relentless extraction of natural resources, cycles of overproduction and overconsumption, the perpetual expansion of markets, the fabrication of artificial, unsustainable demand, and the hegemony of fossil fuel-powered militaries and the paradigm of infinite economic growth on a finite planet.
The historical roots of this extractivism trace back to the first colonial conquests of peoples and the establishment of the first multinational corporations, such as the Dutch East India Company. The blueprint for merging militarization with global extraction was established, which the fossil fuel industry follows today. Extractivism and global imperialism are also rooted in the Transatlantic Slave Trade, and have elevated countries responsible for the ongoing effects of colonialism and colonization. These countries utilized global imperialism to establish and foster fossil fuel dependence. Acknowledging this specific historical continuity is crucial for demanding reparations for all peoples, communities and nations whose lives, resources and economies have been subjugated and continue to be exploited for profit accumulation.
Fossil fuels served, and continue to serve, as the primary engine for this system, facilitating rapid industrialization and the concentration of wealth within the Global North. This process imposed ecological degradation, systemic dispossession, and forced underdevelopment upon the Global South, ultimately precipitating the excessive and accelerated accumulation of atmospheric greenhouse gases.
Extractivism has long been associated with gender-based violence, sexual exploitation and trafficking, as well as devastating health impacts, including in particular reproductive health impacts. The systematic exclusion of women and gender-diverse people, in particular rural and Indigenous women from land rights, resource governance, and decision-making processes has perpetuated their dispossession while rendering invisible their essential role as stewards of territories and ecosystems.
These neocolonial, extractivist relations endure to this day through contemporary mechanisms, including:
Unequal trade and investment regimes
Land grabbing, pollution, and resource plundering of the South to satiate the consumption demands of the Global North elites, corporations, and governments.
Financial architectures designed to siphon wealth from the Global South - including supply driven lending and , conditional lending by institutions like the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, the centrality of the US dollar in the global monetary system, and pervasive profit repatriation, tax avoidance, and illicit financial flows - resulting in a massive net outflow of capital from the South to the North
Exploitation of people and their environments and natural resources by Global North elites, corporations, and governments, often with complicity of Global South elites, corporations and governments
Export-oriented agriculture and food production undermining indigenous food systems and sustainable agriculture that priorities domestic needs especially food staples
Onerous legal and investment protection frameworks that entrench legacy fossil fuel contracts, such as ISDS, thereby curtailing the sovereignty of Global South nations and restricting their capacity to renegotiate or terminate long-term agreements with multinational corporations
Increased militarism and presence of Global North military forces in and proximate to the Global South
Colonial energy infrastructures—including mining operations, pipelines, grids, and refineries established through occupation—function to lock in political control over populations.
Energy dependency on occupying powers is not merely a vestigial legacy of colonialism; rather, it remains an active and ongoing instrument of domination and death.
The climate crisis transcends the question of what type of energy is produced and consumed; it is also a question of how energy and related resources are extracted and utilized, and how economies are structured and governed.
B. Ecological debt, Climate debt, and Common but Differentiated Responsibility
The primary historical responsibility for the climate crisis lies with Global North elites, corporations, and governments. It is the consequence of centuries of unbridled and rapid fossil fuel use for overproduction, settler colonialism, economic conquest, land extraction, cultural and political domination, and high-consumption patterns. This has resulted in excessive concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, causing global warming and climate change.
The Global North's elites, corporations, and governments owe a huge climate debt to the Global South. More massive than the financial debts being claimed from the South. Climate debt represents the Global North’s moral and financial obligation for its disproportionate exploitation of the global atmospheric commons. This debt includes the liability incurred from the historical over-appropriation of the planetary carbon budget to fuel Northern industrialization and the responsibility to fund the survival and resilience of vulnerable communities currently facing the catastrophic consequences of a climate crisis they did not create.
This obligation is no longer merely a moral claim. It is increasingly bolstered by emerging international legal standards, such as the ICJ Advisory Opinion, that affirm States' duty to prevent climate harm and to provide comprehensive reparations. Codified through the principle of Common But Differentiated Responsibilities (CBDR) under the UN climate regime, climate justice necessitates the explicit recognition of this historical and ongoing debt, the delivery of reparations, and a mandate for high-emitting nations to lead in rapid emissions reductions, technology transfer, and the provision of climate finance to cover the costs of mitigation, adaptation, loss and damage and just transition in the Global South.
The climate debt is part of a much larger and more encompassing economic, social, political, and ecological debt that is rooted in colonialism and capitalist conquest, patriarchy, and slavery, that are characterized by intensive exploitation of both humanity and nature for centuries. Ecological debt is the cumulative liability for the historical and continuing systematic plundering of natural resources, environmental degradation, the loss of nature, biopiracy, and the appropriation of Indigenous knowledge. It encompasses the use of lands in the South for production of crops for global markets with heavy use of harmful agrochemicals, for waste disposal and the exploitation of resources far beyond their regenerative capacity. This debt captures a fundamental structural imbalance: a paradigm in which the Global North consumes more than its territory can sustain, leaving a legacy of environmental ruin for future generations to inherit.
It is imperative that a just transition addresses climate and ecological debt by ensuring the delivery of reparations, equitable energy access for sustainable development and the fulfillment of human rights, and the individual and collective rights of all communities and peoples, within planetary boundaries.
A just transition must also rectify the care debt owed to women, LGBTQI + people, and those who have historically performed the undervalued and unpaid reproductive labor that sustains neoliberal economies.
It must also ensure that migrants and displaced peoples, who have been displaced by climate changes and the same systems fueling our climate crisis, receive cross-border political and funding support to ensure their human rights, wellbeing, and right to work.
Deep structural asymmetries between the Global North and the Global South continue to shape the international financial architecture, with financial flows moving from South to North through debt service while ecological and climate debts owed by the North remain unpaid. Debt burdens systematically pressure countries of the South to expand oil, gas, coal, and mineral extraction to generate foreign exchange, reinforcing the very dynamics that drive the climate crisis. The Platform’s relevance will depend on its ability to challenge this structural imbalance and help countries reclaim fiscal and policy space for a just, sovereign, and people-centered transition, rather than reinforcing mechanisms that perpetuate ecological debt, extractivism, and dependence.
III. Principles for the Just Transition and Vision for a Fossil Free Future Integration andSummary of Principles from 2 twin documents -
Principles for the Rapid, Equitable and Just Phase-out of Fossil Fuels - link to draft to be provided
Principles for the Rapid, Equitable, and Just Transition to Renewable Energy Systems.pdf
Principle One: Rapid, transformative, and science-based, while drawing from ancestral and popular knowledge and wisdom
This principle recognizes that the transition must be a rapid systemic overhaul guided by rigorous climate science and drawing from Indigenous, ancestral, multicultural, and collective wisdom to ensure that solutions are ecologically sound and socially grounded.
The transition must be conducted at the scale and speed necessary to limit global warming to 1.5°C and reach real zero emissions by 2050. The transition must be fundamentally transformative and systemic, moving beyond incremental, market-driven adjustments to address the structural roots of the ecological crisis.
Principle Two: Fair and Equitable - Based on Historical and Continuing Responsibility
The transition should acknowledge the Global North's elites, corporations and governments' share of historical and ongoing responsibility for the climate crisis, as well as the Common but Differentiated Responsibilities (CBDR) of nations. This means that the Global North must take on a much larger share of the effort, proportionate to its share of accumulated historical and continuing emissions, and a faster phase-out. Equity must be operationalized through clear targets, indicators, and accountability mechanisms to ensure differentiated responsibilities are effectively implemented. These should include the delivery of new, additional, grant-based, predictable and adequate public climate finance by Global North countries for the Global South, consistent with their obligations under Article 9.1 of the Paris Agreement, as part of their fair shares of climate actions and reparations for their climate debt.
The benefits of the transition should also be shared equitably. The transition must be a systemic transformation of global production, trade, and consumption patterns so that resources and essential services are distributed based on human and ecological needs rather than market power, and centered on the sovereignty and rights of those most impacted by the climate crisis, such as workers, women, trans, and non-binary peoples, fishers and farmers, migrants, Indigenous Peoples, and Afro-descendant peoples and their communities, youth, people with disabilities, rural and urban poor communities and marginalized territories and sectors.
Principle Three: Addressing Energy Poverty and the Universal Right to Gender-Just, Non-Racist, and Just and Equitable Access to Sufficient Sustainable Energy
At the core of the transition should be a commitment to eliminating energy poverty, ensuring that energy systems are designed to serve the collective well-being of people and the planet. Energy should be treated as a public good and as a collective right. Every community and individual has the basic right to access renewable, safe, affordable, sufficient, and reliable energy for dignified, empowering, and fulfilling lives.
While many governments, financial institutions, and corporations use energy poverty as an excuse to delay the phase-out of fossil fuels or to continue their expansion, the real solution to energy poverty is the rapid, equitable and just transition to renewable energy and the prioritization of decentralized, distributed community and publicly owned and managed energy systems at the core. The construction of power generation infrastructure takes less time; and the production of renewable energy sources is far less costly than that of fossil fuels. Moreover, renewable energy systems are more flexible in scale and modalities, and thus, harder-to-reach areas can be better served. With sufficient support and enabling conditions, renewable energy technologies can and should be made universally available to meet popular needs. Countries can end dependence on importing energy.
For renewable energy systems to be gender-just and non-racist, Indigenous Peoples, Afro-descendants, marginalized communities, vulnerable groups, and underserved populations must be involved and prioritized in renewable energy ownership, planning and implementation.
Principle Four: Efficiency, Sufficiency, Sovereignty and Responsible Use
The transition should be built on the pillars of efficiency, sufficiency, and responsible use, ensuring that energy and material systems are designed to minimize waste and resource extraction while upholding human rights, the rights of Indigenous Peoples, and supporting sustainable, equitable, and inclusive development.
A just transition cannot simply replace a fossil fuel system with another extractivist model that continues to fuel the excessive consumption of elites, corporations, data centers, and AI. Instead, it mandates a radical shift toward a new paradigm that is not just efficient use of energy and material sufficiency and responsible use, which means curbing excessive consumption—especially in the industrial and commercial sectors and among the elites—prioritizing human well-being within planetary boundaries over capital accumulation.
Principle Five: Energy Democracy and Sovereignty
The transition should be a profound shift toward energy democracy and sovereignty. It should recognize people's self-determination, promote democratic ownership and control of their own energy system and their rights to make decisions in building fossil-free and renewable energy systems and in shifting from corporate-dominated models toward more democratic systems. Community and public ownership should be expanded and strengthened through deep co-programming and co-design with the communities that inhabit the territories, including Indigenous Peoples, Afro-descendants, youth, women, frontline communities and workers, and respecting local cultures, traditions, and Indigenous knowledge.
This principle seeks to strengthen democratic and popular participation at all levels of governance, ensuring that the transition is guided by the voices of the people rather than the influence of extractive industries. Planning, decision-making, and implementation should be rooted in continuous participation mechanisms. Energy development should not be imposed from above but should be grounded in social and grassroots realities, and protected by rigorous social, economic, and environmental safeguards. It should align transition plans with local governance and territorial development strategies.
Principle Six: Rooted in People(s)-Centered Human Rights, Justice, and Inclusion, especially of workers, women, migrants, Indigenous Peoples, Afro-descendants, Youth and marginalized sectors, communities, and territories
The transition and phase-out of fossil fuels should be centered on the protection of universal human rights, encompassing civil, political, cultural, economic, and social rights and including rights to clean air and water, land, food, and safe and renewable energy, while actively dismantling systems of discrimination based on gender, race, and class.
The transition should protect, respect, and promote the distinct, internationally and legally recognized individual and collective rights of Indigenous Peoples, including the right to free, prior, and informed consent (FPIC), and end exploitative mining and labor practices. The rights, health, and safety of workers, displaced populations, migrants, frontline and affected communities, children, future generations, and human rights defenders must also be safeguarded. Rather than simply providing a replacement source of income, the just transition must uphold the rights of workers to decent and dignified working conditions, health, education, and housing.
The transition must include recognition of peoplehood for Afro-descendant populations, which includes affirmation of their rights to self-determination, agency, self-organization, and self-governance, as well as unequivocally recognize the Trans Atlantic Slave Trade as a crime against humanity that is largely responsible for the affluent economies of the Global North, and include reparations for stolen bodies, land, and labor.
Principle Seven: Democratic and Sustainable Governance of Land, Water, Ocean, and Natural Resources
The rapid transition from fossil fuels will entail an increase in demand for land, water, ocean, and other natural resources for renewable energy systems. The transition should be committed to the equitable, inclusive, and democratic governance of the Earth’s natural heritage, including the ocean as a vital climate regulator and source of livelihoods, ensuring that the management of these resources is respecting the Earth's vital cycles and social justice. This principle requires integrating energy transition planning with robust territorial and land-use instruments, coastal and marine spatial planning, moving away from extractive models that prioritize industrial expansion over the health of ecosystems and perpetuating harms to the planet, such as deforestation, land and water contamination, biodiversity loss, and earthquakes. This requires reclaiming the commons, decommodification of lands, forests, seas and oceans; land and agrarian reform; respect or communal rights over territories of peasants, fishers and IPs.
Central to the transition is participatory land-use planning that protects the livelihoods of those most connected to the earth, including farmers, fisherfolk, and Indigenous Peoples, and ensures that energy development remains in balance with resilient food systems and local community needs.
A vital pillar of this principle is the restoration and protection of water security, recognizing that fossil fuel extraction has historically depleted and contaminated vital water sources and the shift to renewable energy serves to regenerate hydrological systems, ensuring that water remains a preserved public commons for present and future generations
The transition is incomplete without transforming global agriculture and agro-industrial food systems which includes industrial animal husbandry, which are a major driver of fossil fuel dependence and greenhouse gas emissions. This transformation is also essential to reclaim vast territories for ecosystem restoration, afforestation, and rewilding—our most vital carbon sinks. By shifting toward localized, animal-free ecofarming models, we can secure food sovereignty, promote youth-oriented agricultural initiatives, and create dignified rural livelihoods.
Principle Eight: Sustainable and Equitable Management of Transition Minerals
This principle requires that transition minerals—across extraction, processing, trade, use, and disposal—are governed with strong transparency and accountability, guided by the highest social, environmental, labor, gender, financial, and human rights standards throughout the value chain. Grounded in ecological limits, it mandates strict protection of biodiversity-rich areas, water-stressed areas, transboundary watersheds and their tributaries, , and sacred territories through clearly defined “no-go zones.”
It also advances a circular economy that rejects extractivist models, prioritizes sufficiency, reduces material demand, promotes re-use, repurposing and recycling of materials, and curbs overconsumption.
At the same time, the transition transforms international trade rules to support domestic value addition in producing countries and establishes community benefit-sharing models that recognize Indigenous sovereignty over resources. It ensures transparency and traceability, including public access to contracts and impacts, while institutionalizing inclusive participation such as youth leadership in climate governance. Investments in research and innovation aim to reduce reliance on transition minerals through alternative materials and technologies, ensuring that mineral use is ultimately directed toward a just transition from fossil fuel-based economies centered on human rights and rights of nature rather than profit.
Minerals should not be used for war and militarism.
Principle Nine: Ecological justice, Integrity, and Regeneration
A just phase-out is not about eliminating fossil fuels alone—it is about regenerative development. The transition should be grounded in ecological justice, notably rights of nature, and embedded in a broader economic transformation strategy that charts the trajectory from an extractive economy to a regenerative economy that is inclusive, resilient, and equitable. In this framework, energy access is not just a right, but a restorative act that remains in balance with the ecosystems that sustain all life.
To uphold this principle, the transition commits to protecting biodiversity and preventing further ecosystem degradation, while intentionally integrating restoration and regeneration measures in planning, design, implementation, and management, including through robust social, climate, environmental and where applicable transboundary impact assessments and compliance with environmental standards and safeguards. By avoiding development in high-risk or high-biodiversity areas entirely and prioritizing the preservation of these critical zones, the transition ensures that the pursuit of renewable energy does not inadvertently dismantle the very biological foundations required to sustain life on Earth. This includes preventing new offshore oil and gas development in ecologically sensitive marine areas.
Principle Ten: Mobilizing adequate and just finance and the removal of financial and fiscal barriers
This principle asserts that the global transition must be fully and fairly resourced. The Global North must provide reparations for climate harm, including fulfilling its obligations to provide climate finance to the Global South that is adequate, public, inclusively and autonomously governed, predictable, and non-debt-creating. Direct access without policy conditionalities by countries, communities and peoples should be provided. There should be no harmful intermediation that creates new dependencies, opacity or dispossession.
The transition from fossil fuels should involve removing all financial and fiscal barriers that undermine the capacity of people and countries, especially those in the Global South, to phase out fossil fuels and build renewable energy systems. It should not exacerbate inequitable financial relations and further entrench financial instability.A key problem is the macroeconomic lock-in represented by fiscal dependence on fossil fuels, which blocks energy diversification and threatens national sovereignty when combined with high levels of external debt. This dependence limits fiscal space, reinforces debt cycles, and reduces states' capacity to finance a just energy transition. Hence, the fundamental transformation of the international financial architecture is required.
Central to this shift is the cancellation of unsustainable and illegitimate debts, the transformation of lending and borrowing policies and practices, the pursuit of tax and trade justice, including efforts to eliminate illicit financial flows. Public financing and subsidies for fossil fuel industries and "false solutions" should be redirected towards a rapid, equitable, and just transition.'
It also includes transforming investment frameworks, relations, and policies to align with equity and justice. This mandates the immediate removal of systemic barriers that protect the fossil fuel industry, most notably the Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) mechanism, which allows foreign investors to sue governments over policies to curb fossil fuel production, consumption, licensing, or subsidies.
The energy transition requires various forms of finance—public and private, international and domestic. The private sector bears its share of responsibility for the transformation of energy systems to renewables and must finance and invest in its own renewable energy needs. The private sector including commercial and private banks, insurers, private retirement funds, asset managers, private equity firms, and venture capital are massive enablers of current fossil fuel production and usage and fossil fuel expansion. Private investments in energy systems must be regulated and directed to move away from fossil fuels towards a just transition. and ensure that they serve the collective well-being of people and the planet, while treating energy as a public good.
Principle Eleven: No False Solutions
A genuine transition focuses on the immediate phase-out of fossil fuels and should not be compromised by false solutions and distractions that delay and undermine the phase-out, inflict vast ecological and social harms, threaten and violate human rights, deepen structural dependency and injustices through interconnected systems of oppression, undermine food sovereignty, financialize nature, and shift attention away from the structural roots of the climate crisis and barriers to the transition.
Transitions that centre false solutions such as carbon trading and markets, carbon capture and storage (CCS), carbon dioxide removal (CDR), co-firing ammonia and hydrogen with fossil fuels, nuclear energy, nature-based solutions, large-scale bioenergy, “regenerative grazing,” hydropower, enhanced oil recovery, geoengineering, and nuclear energy—among others—are often shaped by corporate interests rather than public planning, labor rights, and social protection and reinforce racism, casteism, patriarchy, colonialism, and class inequality by concentrating the costs of transition on those already marginalised.
Transition pathways must instead centre Indigenous Peoples, afro-descendants, farmers, peasants, fisherfolk, workers, youth, women and gender diverse peoples, and frontline communities, ensuring land rights, labour protections, participation, and self-determination.
Principle Twelve: Sovereignty, Peace, And Global Justice
Wars of aggression, occupation, and militarization are not only humanitarian and political crises; they are also major drivers of the climate emergency that also stand as profound barriers to the rapid and equitable phase-out of fossil fuels. Although modern warfare is intensely fossil fuel-dependent at every stage, consuming vast quantities of oil and gas, generating enormous greenhouse gas emissions, military emissions are often underreported, exempted, or hidden from climate accounting frameworks. Wars also trigger fires, toxic releases, destruction of ecosystems, and damage to energy and water systems, further compounding environmental harm. In this sense, militarism is not peripheral to the climate crisis—it is deeply embedded in the fossil-fuel economy that is driving planetary breakdown. Military institutions are structurally incompatible with meaningful decarbonisation, and the concept of “sustainable warfare” is inherently contradictory.
Militarism diverts a massive amount of public resources—2.7 trillion USD in 2024 and increasing every year for the last decade—away from renewable energy, public transport, climate adaptation, health, housing, and social protection, and redirects them into military budgets and arms industries. Governments facing insecurity often double down on domestic fossil fuel extraction, strategic reserves, and new oil and gas deals in the name of “energy security,” locking in carbon-intensive infrastructure for decades. Conflict zones make long-term planning, democratic participation, and just transition policies far more difficult to implement. Militarized competition among states also undermines the international cooperation, technology sharing, finance transfers, and trust that are essential for a fair global energy transition.
A world committed to a rapid, equitable phase-out of fossil fuels must therefore also be committed to peace, demilitarization, national sovereignty and self-determination, reparative justice, and the redirection of resources from war-making toward life-sustaining systems powered by renewable energy. Phasing out fossil fuels will remove a driver of war, conflict, and repression at a time of growing geopolitical tension and conflict.
Principle Thirteen: Reparative and Transformative Justice
This principle requires the transition to dismantle historical and ongoing structures and relations of inequality, exploitation, injustices, domination, and discrimination (in all dimensions—class, gender, race, caste, and others - ensure restorative justice and provide reparations for peoples, communities, and nations.
It must address the structural harms caused by the Global North’s fossil fuel extraction and use at the expense of the Global South, while centering Global South leadership, knowledge, and lived experience. It also requires full recognition of all peoples’ individual and collective rights so that the transition does not repeat past dispossession, central to the foundation of many Global North economies, but advances decolonization and self-determination. This includes ending colonial energy dispossession, which involves resource extraction in occupied territories, denial of renewable energy development, and the use of energy dependency for collective punishment.
Global North governments must recognize climate debt and historical responsibility through restitution, compensation, guarantees of non-repetition, decolonization, the transfer of resource rights to dispossessed and displaced peoples, the decommissioning of colonial energy infrastructure, and dedicated finance for renewable transitions under occupation. Reparative action must be central to building a just and equitable future.
Principle Fourteen: International Solidarity and Cooperation
The climate crisis is global and cannot be solved merely through unilateral national action. All peoples share a common stake in a livable planet, but responsibilities differ. A rapid, equitable, and just transition requires countries to act in accordance with their differentiated responsibilities and capacities. The Global North, whose wealth was built on centuries of colonization, imperialism, and subsequent fossil fuel use, must rapidly phase out fossil fuels at home and deliver the rest of its fair share through climate finance for mitigation, adaptation, loss and damage, and just transitions in the Global South. This finance is an obligation, not aid.
International cooperation must include large-scale public finance, technology sharing, capacity building, and policy support to help the Global South leapfrog fossil-fuel dependence and build renewable systems that expand access and reduce inequality. It also requires transforming global financial trade rules that trap countries in debt, austerity, and fossil dependence. The ICJ’s Advisory Opinion from July 2025 confirmed that states have a legal obligation for climate action, including the duty to cooperate and the obligation to regulate private actors. Cooperation should strengthen public institutions, community-led energy systems, resilient grids, and just transition plans that protect workers and communities. States must support a viable pathway toward future negotiation of a Fossil Fuel Treaty—a binding international agreement that enables States to meet their existing legal obligations to phase out fossil fuels.
This principle also calls for peace, democratic multilateralism, and people-centered partnerships over geopolitical rivalry. Renewable energy supply chains, critical minerals, technology, and climate finance must be governed by fairness, labor rights, ecological safeguards, and respect for sovereignty. It means rejecting green colonialism, corporate capture, and polluter influence in decision-making, while protecting environmental and human rights defenders and civic space. A just transition depends on cooperation that shares resources, knowledge, and power so all countries and communities can participate.
Principle Fifteen: System Change
The climate crisis transcends the question of what type of energy is produced and consumed; it is also a question of how energy and related resources are extracted and utilized, and how economies are structured and governed. A rapid, equitable, and just transition away from fossil fuels covers energy and other fossil fuel dependent sectors such as petrochemicals and industrial food systems, particularly fertilizers. It requires dismantling the systemic and institutional drivers of fossil fuel extraction production and consumption and the barriers to the shift toward sovereign, decentralized, sustainable and democratic systems of renewable energy, food, agriculture and industries. It demands dismantling of corporate power and impunity, including their hold over politics.
Solutions to the climate crisis require more than incremental change. We must ensure that the solutions we implement do not inadvertently perpetuate existing inequalities and rights violations, engender new forms of green extraction, or shift the burden of transition onto the world's most vulnerable communities. Solutions must be people-centered and restore agency to the marginalized.
Climate action is inextricably linked to broader goals of equity, justice, liberation and development. We need a comprehensive restructuring of the entire economic, political, and social system. The rapid, equitable, and just transition away from fossil fuel-based economies that is grounded in the reality of planetary boundaries should serve as the catalyst for and a core part of system-wide change. It should acknowledge and overcome fundamental inequalities and exploitative relations across countries and within countries, and of class, gender, race and, caste. It should offer a definitive opportunity to challenge the status quo, dismantle the systems of oppression and dispossession. We need to build new systems and relationships that are not capitalist, patriarchal, racist, extractivist, supremacist and hegemonic.
IV. OUR DEMANDS
A. Complete Equitable and Just Phase-Out of Fossil Fuels aligned with meeting the goal of keeping warming below 1.5°C and reach global REAL ZERO Emissions by 2050
Immediate stop to the expansion of the fossil fuel industry (exploration, extraction, production, distribution). This means
No new coal, gas, or oil projects
No public and private financing of fossil fuel industries and other harmful industries; Redirect finance toward renewable energy systems with priority to decentralized and community-based energy, and developing sustainable industries and economic diversification
Immediate halt to fossil fuel extraction in territories and countries under colonial occupation. Cease fossil fuel transfers that materially sustain genocide, war crimes, illegal occupation, or other grave violations of international humanitarian law.
Commitment, adoption and implementation by all governments (including sub-national governments) of global and national roadmaps with clear and measurable targets, trajectories and timelines for rapid, equitable, and just fossil fuel phase-out and emissions reductions including methane, aligned with the goal of keeping warming below 1.5 C degree and reaching global zero emissions by 2050.
For the Global North
Complete Coal Phase-Out before or by 2030
Phase out of Gas and Oil extraction by the early 2030s
Phase out to Gas in the power sector by early 2030
End Oil and Gas consumption before or by 2040
Fulfill their obligations to provide climate finance (as part of their fair shares of climate action) for the Global South
For the Global South
Complete Coal Phase-Out before or by 2035
Complete Gas Phase-out before or by 2040
Complete Phase-out of Oil before or by 2050
The roadmaps should cover energy and all industries, including aviation, shipping, industrial food systems, petrochemicals, and land-use sectors that are structurally dependent on fossil fuels. Roadmaps should include peak use years and decline rates, reallocation of public financing and subsidies, delivery of climate finance, corresponding targets for the building of renewable energy systems to replace fossil fuels and ensure universal access, just transition mechanisms and plans, removal of financial and economic barriers, tackling fossil fuel overconsumption by Global North countries and all elites and corporations.
The fossil fuel phase-out roadmaps and plans must be integrated into existing climate policy frameworks, including NDCs, to avoid fragmented and non-implementable approaches.
Adoption and implementation of policies and mechanisms for the strong and active participation of communities, Indigenous Peoples, Afrodescendants, workers, farmers and fishers, women, youth, and other sectors in the planning and implementation of fossil fuel phase-out.
Adopt and implement policies and mechanisms to guarantee the internationally recognized collective rights of Indigenous Peoples to self-determination and free, prior, and informed consent, in accordance with the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, and in accordance with paragraph 12(i) of the Work Program on Just Transition adopted at COP30, including the rights of Indigenous Peoples in Voluntary Isolation and Initial Contact.
Ensure that fossil fuel phase-out involves immediate provision of alternative sustainable jobs and livelihoods for workers and communities affected by the phase-out, with targeted measures to offer equal employment opportunities to all, regardless of gender; guarantee decent, dignified, fairly paid, unionized work and livelihoods with adequate incomes to support quality of life for families and communities; and provide retraining and reskilling programs
Ensure governments and corporations fulfill their obligations in providing social protection, compensation packages, pension support, re-skilling and retraining, repair, ecological restoration and rehabilitation.
Ensure that fossil fuel companies cover the huge costs linked to asset retirement and decommissioning obligations (ARO), and deliver effective ecological restoration in areas ravaged by coal, oil, and gas extraction, transportation, processing, power production and distribution Restoration and rehabilitation processes must be done with the leadership and participation of Indigenous Peoples and local communities.
Governments must ensure protection and resilience of critical ecosystems.
Global North to do its Fair Share. This includes, but is not limited to: delivering on their climate finance obligations to the Global South - trillions, not billions - sourced equitably within the Global North – , for mitigation, adaptation, loss and damage and just transition. Part of this will be needed for the fossil fuel phase out in the South; Climate finance must be adequate, predictable, public, and non-debt creating; Climate Finance obligations are legal (UNFCCC Article 4 Paris Agreement Article 9.1) and part of the ethical and historic responsibility to provide reparations based on responsibility for past and continuing harms.
Access to Climate Finance should not be accompanied by policy conditionalities. Direct community access must be provided as one of the mechanisms.
Global North governments must have political will to provide for climate finance. direct community access
Pursue the transformation and strengthening of domestic economies - including economic diversification, expansion and strengthening of sustainable and vital industries and agriculture, shifting away from prioritizing cheap exports and giving primacy to production for domestic needs, moving away from extractive models that prioritize industrial expansion over the health of ecosystems – as vital requirements to providing alternative jobs and livelihoods, moving away from dependence on fossil fuel industries for public revenues, building resilient, sustainable and fossil free economies
Stop criminalization of defenders of human rights and the environment; Make accountable and prosecute all those guilty of human rights violations, end impunity, ensure strong and binding international regulation of corporations and state actors, and guarantee protection, safety, and enabling conditions for defenders and affected communities.
Stop false Solutions in the fossil fuel phase-out process
Immediate end to public and private promotion and financing of false solutions
End promotion and build up of abatement technologies that delay the fossil fuel phase out. No to CCUS, BECCS,
No to ammonia and hydrogen co-firing of fossil fuel projects
No to offsets and carbon trading
Direct shift from fossil fuels to renewables—no to gas as transition fuel
B. Rapid, Direct, Equitable, and Just Transition to 100% Renewable Energy; Ensure Equitable and Universal Access to Renewable Energy
Rapid ethical people-centred, gender-just, rights-based and participative expansion of renewable energy, especially solar and wind, not only to provide for new demands but also to replace fossil fuels and address energy poverty; to be accompanied by adoption and strong enforcement of policies and mechanisms for implementation of robust social, economic, financial/fiscal, gender, environmental, safety and accountability standard, safeguards, regulations
Ensure universal access to sufficient, affordable, and reliable energy, which includes adopting policies that recognize, address, and redress structural and social barriers to access by women, youth, people of color, Afrodescendants, Indigenous Peoples, workers, farmers and fishers, low-income and disadvantaged groups, urban and rural poor communities,
Prioritize the expansion of community and publicly owned, democratically managed, decentralized, and distributed renewable energy systems that give primacy to people and the environment above profit generation; Ensure the equitable sharing of the benefits of renewable energy
Adoption and implementation of policies and mechanisms which ensure strong, active and meaningful participation of communities, Indigenous Peoples, Afrodescendants, workers, women, fishers and farmers, youth, in the planning, implementation and management of renewable energy systems, and acknowledges, respects, and protects the knowledge, identities, and rights of local communities.
Institutionalize regionally differentiated and participatory just transition planning processes that are grounded in local contexts and socio-economic conditions, ensuring that affected workers and communities play a central role in shaping transition pathways, priorities, and development trajectories.
Ensure the respect and protection of human rights in the scale up and establishment of renewable energy systems including the free, prior, and informed consent (FPIC) for Indigenous Peoples, Afrodescendants, and affected communities
Adopt land and natural resource policies that
Proactively address and resolve possible conflict and competition of land and resource use between renewable energy, staple food production, habitat, and other basic needs towards ensuring that all rights and needs are met
Restore and respect territorial rights, inherent sovereignty, and self-determination of Indigenous Peoples, Afrodescendants, peoples and countries
Protect integrity of ecological systems, biodiversity-sensitive areas, water-stressed regions and sacred territories
End extractivist relations and operations, ecological plunder, human rights violations and labor exploitation
Promote re-use, re-purposing and materials recycling programs including minerals, that reduce the need for extracting transition minerals
Global North to fulfill climate finance obligations to the Global South including fully funding the Green Climate Fund, the Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage (FRLD), the Adaptation Fund, and Just Transition Programs which are needed for the building of renewable energy systems in the South.
Mobilize finance and investment in grids, storage, and distributed systems, with the public sector in the lead, and not leaving it primarily to market actors; Promote technology sharing and knowledge exchange
Under the path of socioecological transformation, electrify sectors, especially transport, buildings, and industry to ensure replacement of fossil fuel utilization by these sectors. Electrification needs to be done systematically in an organized manner so that vulnerable populations do not get left out of electrification.
Adopt policies to ensure that corporations play a central role in providing for their own renewable energy needs in private commercial and industrial areas
Adopt and enforce policies to stop excessive and wasteful energy use especially by elites, corporations and governments; Promote and enforce policies on Energy Efficiency and Sufficiency; Design renewable energy systems that minimize waste and resource extraction while meeting the needs of all
Stop promotion of false "clean energy" solutions in the in the shift to renewable energy, including
Nuclear
Waste incineration or project related to waste to energy, refused derived fuel and pyrolysis
Industrial-level production of agro and bio-fuels, palm-oil, forest-based energy, woody biofuels and others derived from monoculture which undermine food sovereignty and production of staple food, damage ecosystems, and result in other social and environmental harm;
Dams and hydro power and geothermal power which destroy the environment and displace communities
Renewable energy projects which unnecessarily and without procedural, restorative and distributive justice destroy the environment, biodiversity and have negative impacts on Indigenous Peoples and communities including displacement from land, loss of livelihoods and loss of cultural practices.
C. End Barriers to the Transition and Pursue Solutions
Financial Barriers and Solutions
End supply-driven lending and loan conditionalities; End debt burdens that undermine the Global South's capacity for public spending on essential services and climate action
Cancel unsustainable and illegitimate debts, starting with debts from fossil fuel development;
Transform lending and borrowing policies that perpetuate debt injustices
Establish UN Framework Convention on Sovereign Debt to ensure democratic, equitable, transparent and accountable global mechanism to address unsustainable and illegitimate debt
Global and National Tax Justice to end corporate and elite tax abuses, illicit financial flows, incentives and bias for the fossil fuel industries; and to ensure mobilization of Global North public resources and increase Global South's capacity for public financing for essential services and climate action including the just energy transition
Adopt progressive tax policies to fund the transition, including:
Wealth taxes
Windfall profit taxes
Higher corporate tax rates especially for multinational corporations
Ending producer fossil fuel subsidies
Polluter Pays taxes including the Climate Damages Tax and surtax on fossil fuel industries’ profits
End tax avoidance and illicit financial flows, including:
use of tax havens
profit shifting by multinational corporations
Advance global tax justice through UN Framework Convention on Tax Cooperation and the international and fair allocation of taxing rights to Global South countries
Shift public spending away from militarism, military operations, arms, wars and acts of aggression – activities that are in violation of human rights and international law, intergenerational justice, sovereignty and self-determination of peoples and nations, result in massive loss of lives and vital infrastructures, and drive some of the highest levels of fossil fuel consumption and greenhouse gas emissions through weapons production, military logistics, and war itself.
Transform the international financial architecture; Overhaul or replace inequitable global financial institutions (e.g. IMF, WB) that promote neoliberal policies, perpetuate economic and financial exploitation, deepen debt bondage of the Global South, and promote false climate solutions
Trade and Investment Barriers and Solutions
Countries should officially commit to cancel Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) agreements and mechanisms; Exclude ISDS from future agreements; Create a coalition of states committed to working towards collective withdrawal from ISDS as an ISDS-free alliance; Stop granting any exceptional rights to foreign investors in contracts that contains arbitration clauses superior to national law, and to stop enforcing and executing ISDS awards in favor of fossil fuels.
Transform or suspend global trade rules to explicitly protect countries’ policy space to pursue green industrial development and economic diversification (via export restrictions, domestic processing and local content requirements, subsidies etc.)
Treat climate technologies as global public goods by reforming intellectual property trade rules to enable technology transfer, including through public ownership of the IP that results from publicly funded research and development.
Ensure international agreements provisions on the trade of and investment in transition minerals—from extraction and processing to trade, use, and disposal— for the adoption and enforcement of the highest environmental, labour, and human rights standards across the entire value chain, and add value and local benefit in “transition mineral” sectors.
Transform and reform WTO agreements and rules towards more equitable, mutually beneficial arrangements, including:
precluding parties from challenging each other’s climate policies,
ensuring transparency and public access to contracts, information on beneficiaries, and impacts across global value chains;
ensuring accountability through mandatory supply-chain transparency and strict compliance with International Humanitarian Law
Adoption and replication of binding international instruments with climate targets currently under negotiation outside the UNFCCC, such as the amendment to Annex VI of MARPOL to decarbonize international shipping.
This framework is the first of its kind in seeking to decarbonize an entire global economic sector, and includes mechanisms to reduce the power of the fossil fuel industry and discourage LNG (on both the supply and demand sides), as well as just and equitable transition mechanisms to address North–South inequalities and vulnerabilities.
Radical Reform of UNFCCC COP Structures and Processes and related Institutions through:
Adoption and enforcement of accountability policies and framework including UNFCCC conflict of interest (COI) definition and policy
Full transparency and public disclosure for all COP participants covering affiliations, funding sources, and requirement to disclose agreement with Paris Agreement goals
Integrity standards for COP Presidencies - Establishing and implementing lobbying registries for COP Presidencies and setting up and oversight body overseeing the implementation of these integrity standards
Prohibition of fossil fuel, Big Tech, and Geoengineering sponsorships, partnerships and consultancies
Ensure that Climate finance funds should not flow to entities complicit in occupation, settlement expansion, or resource extraction from occupied territories
Strengthened climate transparency systems, including open data and tracking of finance, emissions, and implementation
Exclude fossil fuel lobbyists and other industry delegates from polluting sectors from the UNFCCC-processes, TAFF conference and subsequent conferences on a just phase-out of fossil fuels.
Operationalize and Enforce International Court of Justice Advisory Opinion on States' legal obligations to address the drivers of climate change, including fossil fuel production, use, licensing and subsidies, and to cooperate in good faith toward that end. Operationalize and enforce the legal obligations of both states and corporations under international law, global climate agreements, and international human rights
Law, such as the ICJ Advisory Opinion and the IACtHR Advisory Opinion, as well as all other relevant international, domestic and subnational relevant case-law on the matter.
Adopt an International Treaty on Fossil Fuels to create a legally binding framework addressing all major drivers of emissions, including fossil fuel use across food systems and land-use sectors, and focused on stopping expansion, managing a fair phase-out, and ensuring a just transition.
End Corporate Impunity, Immunity and Capture of economies, states and global governance structures and processes, this includes adopting a binding Treaty on Transnational Corporations.
Create new legal institutions to protect all living beings, to ensure fulfillment of obligations for reparations and ecological restoration.
Change Narratives, Paradigms, and Culture
Move away from the culture of consumerism
Build values and cultures of solidarity, justice, ecological stewardship, respect and defense of biodiversity and bioreproductive spaces, communities of life, health, and dignity
Create international news agencies that address ecological conversion and combat the hegemony of lobbies in communications; Ban fossil fuel advertising
Develop training programs for workers to: explain that conversion guarantees high-intensity, safe, and dignified work; demonstrate how the relationship between the right to work and the right to health is possible with conversion and contradicts the fossil fuel model.
Restructure educational programs in schools to build a culture of ecological awareness and justice and banning fossil fuel sponsorships.
Maintain healthy information ecosystems unpolluted by disinformation. This necessitates holding news media at a high standard so that climate change is sufficiently covered and false narratives are not spread and legitimized.
D. Achieve A Comprehensive Just Transition
End authoritarian rule, political repression, imperialism, militarization, and corruption and establish democratic and accountable governments.
End Wars of aggression and the geopolitics of destruction, conquest and occupation by US, Israel and other aggressors; End colonial occupation and post-colonial economic and political domination; Full recognition and respect for the self-determination and sovereignty of peoples and nations; Pursuit of International solidarity and cooperation.
Immediate ceasefires and peaceful resolution of conflicts based on justice, including in Palestine, Lebanon, broader Southwest Asia and North Africa, Sudan, Ukraine and others.
Dismantle systems of discrimination and oppression based on class, race, caste, gender, sexual identity and choice, religion, and beliefs;
Uphold universal human rights, including the rights to clean air and water, land, food, and safe and renewable energy; Safeguard the civil, political, cultural, economic, and social rights of all people, while actively dismantling systems of discrimination based on gender, race, and class; Protect, respect, and promote the rights of Indigenous Peoples, workers, farmers and fishers, women, LGBQTI+, displaced populations, migrants, frontline and affected communities, children, and human rights defenders;
Recognize the Trans Atlantic Slave Trade as a crime against humanity that is largely responsible for the affluent economies of the Global North, and include reparations and repair for stolen bodies, land, and labor of Afro-descendant peoples.
Pursue care-centred transition policies that deliver transformative solutions to recognize, revalue and equitably redistribute care work—ending the gendered division of labor, guaranteeing universal quality services for health, education and care and placing social protections and community wellbeing at the heart of regenerative economies—to advance gender equality and women's rights in every dimension of the transition.
Protect biodiversity; prevent ecosystem degradation; integrate ecological restoration into the heart of all development.
Build equitable, regenerative, resilient and circular economies that include:
Ending extractivism
Democratizing and socializing control and management of economic resources and pursuing redistribution; Reclaiming the commons
Strengthening localized, sustainable and biodiverse staple food production and distribution, expanding agroecology and ending export oriented agro-industries, prioritizing food sovereignty and transitioning away from fossil-fuel-dependent industrial animal agriculture, including the phase-out of associated subsidies and inputs
Expanding and decorporatizing public services (health, education, water, housing, transport, access to affordable and sufficient electricity and energy)
prioritizing sufficiency and the reduction of material demand by addressing excessive consumption by elites, corporations and governments
scaling climate adaptation and resilience programs
freeing land from industrial livestock production to enable large-scale ecosystem restoration and rewilding
implementing territorially differentiated just transition - across countries and within countries - reflecting national and local socio-economic and environmental conditions and common but differentiated responsibilities (CBDR). This requires the institutionalisation of place-based, bottom-up planning processes at subnational and regional levels. These processes should center affected workers and communities in articulating transition pathways and priorities, ensuring that strategies reflect diverse socio-economic realities within and across regions rather than relying on one-size-fits-all approaches.
Provide reparations for historical and continuing harms inflicted on communities, people, and ecosystems.
V. CONCLUSION
The ever-growing threats to humanity of the geopolitics of destruction, impoverishment, inequality and climate collapse underscore with greater urgency the need to rapidly and equitably transition away from fossil fuels and the broader system of fossil-fuel-dependent energy, food, and material production. Never before has the path to a sustainable future been laid out more clearly – true security of communities and peoples lies in the fast, fair, publicly funded, and feminist shift to 100% renewable energy systems, specifically rejecting false solutions like carbon capture and fossil gas.
This is a historical challenge that requires a fundamental and comprehensive rethinking of the status quo that a handful of North governments, corporations and elites today desperately seek to maintain at the expense of the Global South. These are structures and systems created and driven by profit and greed, characterized by the relentless dispossession and exploitation of working peoples and the unhampered pillaging and plunder of nature in the name of consumption-fueled, neoliberal growth.
The ICJ Advisory Opinion affirms that existing international law—including treaty law, customary international law, and human rights law—imposes binding obligations on States to address the climate crisis. These include exercise due diligence in regulating emissions and preventing harm. These obligations are not aspirational, they are enforceable. Every year of delays deepens injustice and magnifies the suffering of those least responsible for the crisis.
Fossil fuels and the systems they sustain, including industrial food systems, petrochemicals, and extractive land use, are the engines driving these structures, under which peoples and the planet face a dark and bleak future of escalating chaos. We will not allow their continued domination to define generations to come.
The longer the hesitation of shifting to renewables, the closer we are pushed into such a future. Crises in multiple fronts are already upon us, and the tipping point is terrifyingly close. Every year of continued reliance on coal, oil, and gas moves us closer to the brink of climate and socio-economic collapse, with the harshest impacts inflicted on the dispossessed, impoverished and discriminated.
We must therefore will the present and future we want through our power as movements, mobilizing people in their millions to demand the changes needed to build just and sustainable societies and economies. Transitioning to renewable energy sources must happen at a pace that matches the scale of the crisis, requiring decisive action. Hesitation is costly economically, and deadly for people and the planet.
The First Conference on Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels is already taking an important step in this direction, committing to initiate “a concrete process through which a coalition of committed countries, subnational governments, and relevant stakeholders can…implement a progressive transition away from fossil fuels creating sustainable societies and economies.”
But we must also ensure that we go beyond inspiration, pronouncements of intent and lofty aspirations. Let the Santa Marta Conference be a defining point for decisive action!
The hour is upon us to expose the blockers and deniers and their false solutions, from carbon capture and carbon offsets to “clean” coal and natural gas as a transition fuel. The time is nigh for bold and concrete action to dismantle the central cogs of the machinery—fossil fuels—which run the very structures and systems that brought us in the first place to this point of planetary emergency. The moment is NOW for a real advance in phasing out fossil fuels and embarking on a just and equitable transition to renewable energy systems.
This requires no less than deep and far-reaching system change. Forged in struggle, our movements must stay the course and advance the bigger and strategic fight for the systemic transformation of societies, economies and political systems—at all levels—global, regional, national and local. This is the path towards true climate justice and the liberation of all peoples from dispossession, exploitation, discrimination, ecological devastation and the inequities and human rights violations that oppress us all.
