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“When a power plant closes in a rural area, you don’t just lose jobs,” said Manuel Riera of UGT, one of Spain’s largest unions. “You risk losing the life of the place – the families, the neighbours, the school, the bus line. To keep people rooted, we have to rebuild whole economies.”

The end goal is to safeguard workers, diversify rural economies, and keep families rooted.

Spain’s breakthrough: dialogue and territorial pacts

Spain is among the few countries to have managed coal closures through negotiated territorial pacts. Since 2018, 15 agreements have been signed between national, regional and local governments in areas hit by mine and power plant shutdowns. The government also reached tripartite accords with unions and coal companies, guaranteeing solutions for affected workers.

“For the first time, workers and their communities had a seat at the table. It demonstrated that a just transition is possible and that social dialogue with trade unions must be the first step” Riera said. “That gave people dignity in a moment of loss.”

These frameworks funded retraining, supported job-creating projects and ensured public participation. They became an international reference for how social dialogue can guide decarbonisation.

A just transition for renewables: Why COP30 must put people before power

Lessons learned: from energy to social transition

But the experience has also exposed key limits. Job creation alone has not been enough to sustain rural life.

“Again and again we heard: in addition to employment, what decides if families stay is whether there is transport, housing, health care, education,” Riera said. “That is what keeps a territory alive. We have to move from an energy transition to a social transition.”

Judit Carreras Garcia, director of the Instituto para la Transición Justa (ITJ), reflected on the government’s efforts to respond to these challenges:

“Over the years, we have sought to make the just transition a reality through concrete policies and actions — walking the talk through a wide range of measures that include employability schemes, training, funding lines for job-creating business initiatives, just transition energy tender grids, municipal support programmes and environmental restoration,” she explained.

“All of them aim at minimising the impacts of decarbonisation and optimising outcomes based on participation and social dialogue. This effort has come with its own challenges — from managing timing gaps to addressing very different territorial starting points — but our commitment remains firm.”

Both unions and government acknowledge that anticipation is crucial: closures must be aligned with new opportunities, and support must adapt to vastly different territorial realities – from regions facing depopulation to those with stronger infrastructure.

The next phase for just transition

UGT is now working with its federations to shape Spain’s next Just Transition Strategy (2026–2030). Visits to pact areas, including Aragón, where a coal plant closed in 2020, reveal a rising sense of frustration.

“People are tired of waiting,” Riera said. “We have projects on paper, but they don’t see them materialising. Without effective coherent planning, workers retrain and then have to move to Madrid or Barcelona. That is not territorial justice.”

The unions’ demand: keep the territorial approach, but expand it across ministries and sectors, ensuring that services and infrastructure grow alongside jobs.

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Behind the technical debates lies a deeper fear: the hollowing out of rural Spain, where thousands of villages have already lost their young people and their future. A mishandled transition could accelerate that trend.

“This is not only about jobs,” Riera said. “It is about whether towns survive at all. When a power station shuts, it’s not just the jobs inside the gates that disappear. The bus stops running, the school risks closing, the clinic can’t keep going, housing starts to deteriorate. Families leave, and a town empties. And once they leave, they rarely come back.”

Sharing lessons internationally

In September, Riera met unions from around the world to share Spain’s experience. His message was simple: we must fight for social dialogue and territorial agreements, but these are the beginning — not the end — of a just transition.

“If decisions are only made in the capital, they miss what life is like in a village. What Madrid sees as energy policy, a small town sees as survival: will there still be a bus, a clinic, a school? That is why workers and communities must always be in the room.”

For Riera, the work that goes into the just transition is also a chance to imagine something new.

“We can use this moment not just to protect people from loss, but to renew rural life — to make villages places where families want to stay, where children can imagine their future. This is about dignity, but also about love: love of place, love of community, love of life itself.”

“Water is worth more than lithium,” Indigenous Argentine community tells COP30

A call for Belém – and beyond

Now in Belém for COP30, Riera is bringing a clear message to world leaders: Spain’s experience shows that the just transition must be built from the ground up. The Belém Action Mechanism that has been proposed, he argues, should require cross-sector transition plans – not just energy policies; guarantee participation from workers and communities; and secure public finance capable of delivering not only jobs but the services that sustain life around them.

“The Global South faces the same challenge: how to transition without abandoning people. Without public finance, that is impossible,” he said. “If we treat the just transition as a bargaining chip, we betray them. But if we take it seriously, we can create hope — from Spain to Brazil, from Santander to Belém.”

“This is not only about closing coal or opening renewables,” he added. “It is about whether people can imagine a future for their children. That is what the just transition means.”

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At 3,400 metres (11,150 feet) above sea level in the arid highlands of northwest Argentina, 29-year-old Franco Vedia tends his llamas and fields in the Indigenous community of Tusaquillas – one of more than 30 communities across the Salinas Grandes and Laguna de Guayatayoc Basin.

Here, life revolves around a single, sacred element: water, the source that feeds the lagoon, sustains crops and animals, and has anchored centuries of Indigenous life.

The Salinas Grandes, shared between the provinces of Jujuy and Salta, is one of the largest salt flats in South America. Beneath it lies another resource: lithium, the mineral driving the global race for batteries that power the energy transition.

“Lithium activity is water mining,” Franco said. “It consumes vast amounts of water in the Puna – a resource already scarce and extremely valuable here.”

Across Argentina’s northern provinces, environmental groups warn that lithium extraction has already dried rivers and degraded fragile Andean wetlands. The struggle of the Puna communities mirrors that of others across the Gran Atacama region – spanning Argentina, Chile and Bolivia – the so-called lithium triangle, home to more than half the world’s known reserves.

For communities like Franco’s, the balance kept for generations is breaking under a development model that promises progress at the cost of survival.

“If the water disappears, life disappears,” he added.

Families grow beans, potatoes and corn; raise llamas, sheep, and goats; and weave textiles by hand. In recent years, some have opened small community-based tourism projects. “We want to show the world how we work the land and what it means to us,” Franco said.

Their livelihoods sustain an ancient way of life – one now threatened by the expansion of lithium mining.

The energy transition paradox

Global demand for lithium is soaring as countries in the Global North accelerate their energy transitions. While lithium extraction is often portrayed as a solution to the climate crisis, the extraction process risks irreversible damage to fragile ecosystems such as the Andean wetlands.

Franco reflected on the global paradox of the energy transition: “We all use cellphones, computers and cars. It would be hard to imagine a world without technology. But what’s truly impossible is imagining a world without water.”

In the Andean cosmovision – a worldview that sees nature as part of the community – water is a living being. “When a water source is destroyed, a part of the community is destroyed. Without water, there is no balance and no existence,” Franco added.

A decade of community resistance

For more than 10 years, the Indigenous communities of Salinas Grandes and Laguna de Guayatayoc have resisted the entry of lithium companies. Mining projects have advanced without basin-wide environmental assessments or reliable baseline data – in a region already parched and vulnerable to climate change.

Their defence is not only of water and life, but of human rights: the right to information, participation and free, prior, and informed consent, guaranteed under the the UN-brokered Escazu Agreement, and the International Labour Organization’s Convention 169, a binding agreement concerning the rights of Indigenous peoples.

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To protect their rights, the communities have taken their claims to national and international courts and created the Kachi Yupi Biocultural Protocol, defining how consultation must take place. Supported by organizations such as FARN (Environment and Natural Resources Foundation), they are building networks of technical and legal assistance.

Franco emphasised the importance of developing these networks to protect their territory: “It is very important for us that support comes from within, from our own people and from those individuals and organisations who want to defend life, the territory, Mother Earth, and the cosmovision of Buen Vivir.”

The road to COP30 in Belém

Franco will bring the voice of the Salinas Grandes to COP30 in Belém, Brazil.

“We want to show the world what is happening in our territories. Many communities across Latin America face the same situation. We need to unite our voices to defend water, human rights, and our collective right to live,” he said.

As the energy transition accelerates and minerals like lithium are treated as the next frontier, Franco carries an ancestral truth: “Water is worth more than lithium – because without water there is no life.”

Global call to rethink transition model

The defence of the Salinas Grandes Basin is more than a local struggle. It is a global call to rethink an energy-transition model that risks repeating the extractivism it claims to replace.

A truly just transition must respect community rights and participation, safeguard the ecosystems on which life depends, and place justice, equity and human rights at its core. The extraction of so-called critical minerals cannot repeat the same logic that has long harmed Indigenous peoples and degraded nature.

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As COP30 gets underway, the proposed Belém Action Mechanism (BAM) – a civil-society call for a global just transition rooted in rights and ecological integrity – offers a path towards the transformation Franco’s community demands.

His message to Belém is simple and urgent: “The energy transition cannot be built on the destruction of water. True progress means caring for life.”

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In Kenya, poor consultation with local communities led to a landmark ruling that revoked the licence for a proposed geothermal project. In India, a 1-gigawatt (GW) solar project funded by the Asian Development Bank was cancelled in 2025 after protests by tribal communities, who reported a lack of proper consultation and faced the displacement of 20,000 people.

In Chile, wind farms built for green hydrogen exports are meeting resistance as residents say such projects threaten ecosystems and livelihoods. In the Philippines, the Tumandok Indigenous people oppose a mega-hydropower project. They say the project risks flooding their ancestral lands and sacred sites, and has violated their right to free, prior and informed consent. And in Pakistan, the 4-GW Dasu Hydropower Project has already uprooted more than 7,000 people, leaving 34 villages abandoned. 

With clean energy mega-projects becoming the norm, as shown in a recent report by CAN International, such conflicts are only likely to increase in number unless things change.

Growth without justice

Despite record expansion, deployment of renewables remains far too slow and far too unequal. Many developing countries are constrained by debt and limited fiscal space, while rich nations continue to over-consume energy.

Even where renewables are rising, the benefits often flow to foreign corporations. And power fed back into national grids frequently enriches independent power producers while leaving consumers with high bills.

For Indian women workers, a just transition means surviving climate impacts with dignity

Egypt illustrates the dilemma. To meet its green hydrogen targets and bring in hard currency to service its debt, the country needs to install 41 GW of renewable capacity by 2030 and 114 GW by 2040 – five to fifteen times its current renewable capacity. Four percent of Egypt’s land has been designated for green hydrogen production, even as droughts and water scarcity worsen.

Under the EU-led Global Gateway initiative, some of this electricity could be exported to Europe through the GREGY interconnector. Meanwhile, Egypt is becoming a hub for ‘green’ data centres, even as rural areas and public healthcare facilities face rolling blackouts.

“Some of the world’s largest solar projects are in Morocco and Egypt – but they’re built mainly for export, not to meet domestic needs,” says Mohamed Kamal, executive director of Greenish, an Egypt-based civil society organisation. “The real challenge now is governance: how to ensure that new investments serve local people first, especially in regions that still lack the infrastructure for consistent energy supply.” 

“As we build the renewable energy economy, we must not repeat the mistakes of the fossil fuel era,” he adds. “We cannot look to those failed models for inspiration or replicate their structures of control within the renewable energy value chain.”

A just transition mechanism for renewables at COP30

At COP30 in Belém, civil society networks including Climate Action Network are calling for the Belém Action Mechanism (BAM) for a Just Transition under the UN climate process to make a fair transition real.

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BAM would bring together the many initiatives now working in isolation, from practitioner alliances to community projects or programmes led by intergovernmental organisations. This will help countries change course by removing structural barriers such as debt, unfair trade rules and limited technology transfer that keep developing countries at the bottom of renewable supply chains.

It will also unlock public finance to support worker upskilling, green industrial policies and inclusive ownership models and distributed renewable systems. Furthermore, it can create structured dialogue between governments, workers and communities to share best practices, strengthen participation and scale up solutions that deliver. 

Such a mechanism could help countries develop not only more renewables, but better ones – people-centred, community-led and domestically owned.

Restoring trust, accelerating transition

Globally, the world is not on track to triple renewable capacity by 2030 – as agreed at COP28 – and fossil fuel emissions remain stubbornly high. Unless the renewable transition becomes fairer, it will also become slower.

From rooftop-solar schemes in India that cut bills and spare land, to initiatives in the Philippines, where a coalition of civil society, faith-based and industry groups has launched a “Ten Million Solar Rooftops” challenge, examples are emerging across the world of what fair, people-centred renewables can look like.

In Canada and Australia, projects led by communities or Indigenous people are showing the same spirit. In Western Australia, the Aalga Goorlil “Sun Turtle” Community Power Project – led by the Djarindjin Aboriginal Corporation – aims to reduce the community’s reliance on non-renewable energy and has already become a symbol of self-determination since the community’s official recognition last year. In Bolivia, solar power is strengthening food and economic security for local farming and fishing communities.

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A global just transition mechanism could scale up such efforts, restoring trust and placing equity at the centre of decarbonisation and access to quality energy for everyone.

“Justice isn’t an add-on,” says Mohamed Kamal. “It’s the condition for progress. Without it, the transition won’t hold.” As negotiators prepare for COP30, the question is not only how fast the world can build renewables, but who they are built for and how.

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