Accessibility Tools

Web Accessibility plugin by DJ-Extensions.com

On the Ground

Explore our work with partners, globally and locally, to tackle social and economic injustice using a human rights lens.

We will be at Cop 29! Stay tuned!

We will be at Cop 29! Stay tuned!

We are glad to inform you that we will participate in the 29th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP29) from November 11 to 22 in Baku, Azerbaijan.

We joined calls from civil society organisations, activists, communities, movements, groups, and individuals expressing strong concerns about Azerbaijan's suitability to provide safe conditions for an independent civil society and provide leadership to drive an ambitious and just transition to low-carbon societies without delay.

We call on Azerbaijan to uphold its international human rights obligations and call on the UNFCCC Secretariat to publish and include human rights safeguards in future host country agreements. This is essential to ensure the negotiations are conducted safely in an environment that enables effective and urgent climate action in this critical decade.

In the climate negotiations at COP29, we will actively engage and focus our attention on the following key issues to ensure economic, social, cultural, and environmental rights in climate policy:

Climate Finance – An Ambitious New Collective Quantified Goal (NCQG)

After years of negotiations, Parties are expected to adopt a New Collective Quantified Goal (NCQG) for climate finance at COP29, based on a floor of USD 100 billion per year to meet the needs of developing countries. However, as the climate emergency intensifies, the amount needed by developing countries to address climate-related impacts is estimated to exceed USD 1.1 trillion in 2025, rising to around USD 1.8 trillion by 2030. The NCQG adopted should provide the basis for building confidence in international cooperation and unleashing ambitious climate finance to address the unprecedented challenges facing developing countries.

To this end, the NCQG must ensure sufficient and high-quality climate finance that contributes to implementing the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities (CBDR) as envisaged in the Paris Agreement. This includes ensuring that climate finance expands the fiscal space needed for effective climate action.

Currently, only 5% of total climate finance is provided through grants, which needs to be improved to achieve the required structural transformation in all sectors of the economy. The NCQG should ensure that countries receive non-concessional grant-based financing to avoid escalating debt burdens in developing countries. It must also be transparent and ensure that it reaches frontline communities and individuals who suffer disproportionately from the impacts of climate emergency, including women, Indigenous Peoples, people with disabilities, and other groups facing structural conditions of marginalisation.

To achieve these essential goals, the NCQG must promote the provision of public funds, avoiding an over-reliance on credit. Promoting international cooperation towards adopting progressive and green tax policies will be vital to taking concrete steps. The NCQG should make those most responsible for the climate emergency —polluting industries, wealthy individuals, and corporations— pay the financial costs of a just and equitable transition to low-carbon societies and economies.

In addition, the adopted NCQG must put human rights at the centre of the climate finance system. This is imperative to ensure that human rights guide the priorities of climate finance flows, raising ambition through the compliance by developed States of their extraterritorial obligations to promote economic, social, and cultural rights on a global basis by an increase in the provision of funds, ensuring the participation of communities and civil society organisations in decision-making, and including vital human rights safeguards in climate finance projects to avoid human rights violations while advancing climate policy.

Just Transition – Steering a Just and Rapid Transformation Towards Sustainable Societies and Economies That Protect People and the Planet

At COP27, a mandate was established to develop a Just Transition Work Programme (JTWP). At COP28, its modalities were adopted to achieve the goals of the Paris Agreement while addressing poverty and structural inequalities between and within countries. The Work Programme aims to create knowledge-sharing spaces and encourage conversations with stakeholders to develop promising practices for just transition frameworks and strategies. While the JTWP provides a broad framework to advance this critical discussion, essential questions remain to refine its content and ensure its effective implementation.

Against this backdrop, the JTWP must help ensure a rapid and equitable phase-out of fossil fuels and a shift towards sustainable economies and societies that create better conditions for the well-being of people and the planet. This means that the transition to environmentally sustainable societies must deliver social and economic benefits for all, especially for the most marginalised, and that the repetition of abuses and power imbalances must be avoided. The JTWP must, therefore, aim to unlock benefits for poverty reduction and promote more significant equity across different groups and sectors, including energy, labour, socio-economic, and other dimensions, and be based on social dialogue and the meaningful and effective participation of all stakeholders.

To this end, climate negotiations on Just Transition must be guided by the international human rights framework, particularly placing economic, social, cultural, and environmental rights at the heart of the transformation of all sectors of the economy. This is important to guide synergies between climate resilience and socio-economic development with just and equitable outcomes.

In addition, the JTWP must go beyond providing spaces to exchange best practices and present concrete, actionable recommendations for national climate policies and different work areas in the UNFCCC negotiations. The JTWP should build on and complement the fulfilment of other relevant UNFCCC fora mandates to put equity and eliminate inequalities at the heart of climate action.

Gender Equality – A New, Strengthened Enhanced Lima Work Programme and Gender Action Plan to Achieve Gender Equality in Climate Action

The Enhanced Lima Work Programme and the Gender Equality Action Plan are the main instruments adopted to promote gender equality under the UNFCCC processes. After five years of implementation, they were reviewed this year to assess the progress made since their adoption at COP25.

On this basis, negotiations will take place at COP29 to develop a new Gender Action Plan with an extended timeframe, concrete targets, and indicators. The decision on the new Gender Action Plan (GAP) must not entail merely a renewal but also the strengthening and inclusion of more ambitious targets to advance gender equality in climate policy and action.

Gender equality and women's rights must be mainstreamed in all areas of the UNFCCC to raise ambition and take climate action that puts the needs of people of different genders at the centre. The new GAP must, therefore, include a solid intersectional gender perspective with indicators based on human rights norms and principles. It must also promote the participation of people of different genders, who are usually marginalised, and support coherence in the adoption of a gender perspective in all UNFCCC areas of work.

In this new version of the GAP, it would be crucial to recognise the link between climate and care in the transition to a sustainable economy. The care responsibilities are increasing as the climate emergency escalates and climate-related disasters threaten critical infrastructure such as health and education facilities.

In addition, local ecosystems essential for food production are eroding and increasing health risks. This increases the need for care, borne mainly by women and girls already suffering from the consequences of highly strained care systems. In the new GAP, effective gender-sensitive climate action must, therefore, contribute to supporting care work by extending the benefits and coverage of social protection systems, investing in public services, and promoting the role of women and local communities in caring for the environment.

This is crucial in integrating economic, social, and cultural rights into a new, more ambitious GAP that can deliver substantive gender equality in climate action.

 These are the main areas of work and demands that GI-ESCR, together with other partners, will focus on advancing by actively coordinating side events and contributing to collective advocacy strategies to inform and influence climate negotiations.

We see the development of collective advocacy during COP29 on these critical issues as crucial stepping stones to building momentum towards the next COP30 in Brazil. This could provide more meaningful opportunities to bring a human rights approach to the critical agendas on climate finance, just transition, and gender equality, which is fundamental to realising socio-economic rights within planetary boundaries.

To answer questions, explore opportunities for collaboration, and coordinate with media, please get in touch with the following GI-ESCR team members who are following COP28 negotiations in person:

  • Alejandra Lozano  This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. 
  • Ezequiel Steuermann This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. 

Stay tuned for our upcoming activities and events!

 

Related Articles

GI-ESCR Advances Tax Justice and Rights-Based Just Transition Demands at SB64

GI-ESCR Advances Tax Justice and Rights-Based Just Transition Demands at SB64

Martín Pintus
Santa Marta’s Test: Turning Fossil Fuel Commitments into Rights-Based Action

Santa Marta’s Test: Turning Fossil Fuel Commitments into Rights-Based Action

Martín Pintus
We Joined the Women and Gender Constituency in Holding a Teach-In to Disseminate the Proposal for the BAM

We Joined the Women and Gender Constituency in Holding a Teach-In to Disseminate the Proposal for the BAM

Macarena Cano Muñoz

SITEMAP

TAKE ACTION

NEWSLETTER

Don´t miss any updates!
SUBSCRIBE
Image

Social Media:

Log in

Climate and Environmental Justice

We have advanced rights-based and gender-transformative transition frameworks through research that centres the lived experiences of women and marginalised communities on the frontlines of extractive energy policies, promoting climate and energy frameworks attentive to the social and care-related impacts of transition pathways. We have developed a clear vision for a gender-just transition, firmly rooted in gender and human rights norms, establishing both the legal basis and the direction for the transformative changes our planet and societies urgently need. In particular, the ‘Guiding Principles for Gender Equality and Human Rights in the Energy Transition’, a collective effort built through online consultations, an in-person workshop and multiple rounds of revision with activists, practitioners and experts from around the world, outline a transformative vision for reshaping global energy systems through a human rights and gender equality lens.

Our work recognises that the climate emergency is both an existential threat and an opportunity to reimagine societies built on social, gender, economic and environmental justice. We ground our advocacy in feminist and intersectional principles, prioritising the agency and perspectives of communities in the Global South who have contributed the least to the climate emergency yet face its most devastating consequences. Central to our approach is the understanding that energy is not merely a commodity but a fundamental human right; essential for dignity, health, education, work and the realisation of countless other rights. We challenge approaches to the energy transition that risk replicating the harmful patterns of fossil fuel extraction and, instead, advocate for transformative policies that ensure human rights and gender equality as central to building climate-resilient societies rooted in dignity, justice and planetary well-being.

What's next?

We will continue to challenge approaches that treat energy transition as merely a technical shift, instead positioning it as an opportunity to reimagine economies and societies rooted in dignity for all, with particular attention to communities in the Global South who have contributed least to the climate emergency yet are most exposed to its worst effects.

We will connect community-level evidence and the lived experiences of those on the frontlines of extractive policies to national reform and global norm-setting, breaking down silos between human rights, gender, and climate movements, and advancing a shared vision that recognises just transitions as not only fundamental to achieving climate-resilient and sustainable societies, but as transformative pathways that advance social and gender equality, redistribute power and resources equitably, and ensure that energy systems serve the public good rather than profit.

We will mainstream rights-based and genderjust transition priorities in key multilateral spaces (particularly, within the Just Transition Work Programme and the to-be-developed Just Transition Mechanism, within the UNFCCC) to guarantee that just transitions are advanced at all levels.

We will also translate our work, through strategic advocacy, into at least two concrete policy wins, whether promoted, adopted, implemented, or scaled, in priority countries (Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Mexico, Colombia, South Africa, or Kenya), ensuring these policies align with human rights standards, centre gender equality, and reflect the needs and views of affected communities.

We will build momentum for the progressive recognition of the right to sustainable energy to shift dominant narratives away from purely extractive solutions that sideline gendered impacts, community participation, and Global South perspectives.

Economic Justice and Climate Finance

Our work has transformed the global discussion on fiscal policy in a more just, emancipatory and sustainable direction. Our approach has combined both high-level, expert contributions within decisionmaking circles, with bold, impactful work on narrative change with the general public.

We have been instrumental in the inclusion of human rights as a guiding principle of the future United Nations Framework Convention on International Tax Cooperation, a multilateral instrument with the potential of raising approx. USD 492 billion per year in public revenues currently foregone to global tax abuse. In the process leading to the ‘Compromiso de Sevilla’ decided at FfD4, we proposed and succeeded in creating a specific human rights workstream within the Civil Society Financing for Development Mechanism, which was critical to ensure that explicit commitments on the matter were included in the negotiating outcome. In a context of cutbacks in multilateral institutions, we have amplified the capacities of technical experts, providing rigorous technical support and leveraging our influence to ensure the enactments of groundbreaking standard-setting instruments, such as the 2025 UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights Statement on Fiscal Policy and Human Rights, and the first ex oficio hearing on the Inter-American Commission of Human Rights on Fiscal and Economic Policies to Address Poverty and Structural Inequality, leading to an upcoming thematic resolution on the matter. We have also bridged the silos between multilateral tax discussions and climate finance debates, promoting ambitious financing commitments to increase international and domestic resource mobilisation during COP 28, 29 and 30.

At the regional level, our engagement with fiscal cooperation platforms such as the Platform for Fiscal Cooperation of Latin America and the Caribbean (PTLAC), where we are member of its Civil Society Consultative Council, and the African Anti-IFFs Policy Tracker, for which we participated in the pilot mission in Ivory Coast together with Tax Justice Network Africa (TJNA), have been critical in cementing a growing engagement between tax administrations and ministries of finance with international legal experts, exploring actionable and transformative initiatives, such as the taxation of high-net-worth individuals, beneficial ownership registries and corporate countryby-country reports, to be implemented at the international level.

At the local level, our interventions in fiscal reform debates in Chile, Brazil, Colombia and Nigeria have contributed to shaping legislative outcomes in a more progressive, rights-compliant direction.

As for our leadership in narrative change, we have a measurable track record in delivering tailored, innovative campaigns which have decisively expanded economic justice constituencies by appealing to a broader tent. In Latin America and the Caribbean, we created the ‘Date Cuenta’ campaign, coordinating over 40 organisations across civil society to deliver plain language, innovative messaging connecting progressive fiscal reforms to the financing of health, education and social protection. ‘Date Cuenta’ generated over 55 original campaign messages that were tailored to the realities of seven priority countries (Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Paraguay, Peru and Honduras) and disseminated in Spanish, Portuguese and English. In doing so, we convened more than 65 online co-creation workshops with partners, coordinating a unified communications strategy which combined digital outreach, press and media coverage, and collaboration with influencers. Ultimately, ‘Date Cuenta’ resulted in more than 60,000 interactions on social media, coverage in major regional and international media outlets, including El País, Deutsche Welle, Bloomberg and France 24, and the participation of at least 63 social media influencers through 58 dedicated publications. In collaboration with Fundación Gabo and the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, we also organised a two-day workshop in Bogota with 20 journalists from 13 countries, building a regional network trained in a human rights-based approach to fiscal policy that has since generated published media coverage on outlets such as La Diaria, Ciper, El Diario Ar and Milenio. Through ‘Date Cuenta’ and our regional advocacy, we strengthened civil society engagement in key processes, including the Financing for Development track and FfD4, co-organised highlevel dialogues with states and civil society from Latin America and Africa.

What's next?

We will shape the UN Tax Convention and its Protocols so they embed human rights principles, and we will stay engaged through follow-up processes (including the expected Conference of the Parties) to support effective implementation. We will keep linking tax and climate finance so that new resources mobilised through fiscal cooperation are channelled to adaptation, mitigation, and loss and damage, in line with UNFCCC commitments.

Public Services for Care Societies

We have translated participatory research into accountability and policy outcomes.

In Ivory Coast, our work with Mouvement Ivoirien des Droits Humains and affected communities since 2023 exposed how privatisation and lack of accountability restrict access to quality healthcare. It contributed to the closure of 1,022 illegal private health centres, an executive instrument strengthening the regulation of private hospitals across the country, and the creation of a permanent complaints management committee in healthcare through a bylaw issued by the prefect of Gagnoa. Partners engaged through this process also advanced concrete improvements at facility level: members of the Gagnoa Midwives Association who took part in the participatory action research pooled resources to renovate the neonatal unit of the Regional Hospital, and the Director of the Gagnoa General Hospital launched an action plan to expand services and improve patient reception, with the facility receiving the award for best hospital in the country in 2025.

In Kenya, our research with the Mathare Education Taskforce documented the absence of public schools and the expansion of private provision, evidencing impacts on households and caregivers and strengthening demands for free, quality public education. This work contributed to stronger community agency and collective organisation, alongside ongoing strategies ranging from communications to litigation to secure a public school in the area, some involving GI-ESCR and others led independently.

Across Africa, this work is complemented by a multi-country study examining the human rights implications of austerity in education and health, including how regressive fiscal policies, rising debt burdens and persistent underinvestment undermine the financing and delivery of public services.

In Latin America, from 29 November to 2 December 2021, over a thousand representatives from over one hundred countries, from grassroots movements, advocacy, human rights, and development organisations, feminist movements, trade unions, and other civil society organisations, met in Santiago, Chile, and virtually, to discuss the critical role of public services for our future. Following the meeting, the Santiago Declaration on Public Services was adopted to demand universal access to quality, gender-transformative and equitable public services as the foundation of a fair and just society.

We are currently advancing work on care systems, linking public services and fiscal justice through integrated research, advocacy and communications, including a regional campaign framing care as a collective responsibility requiring sustained public investment.

What's next?

In Ivory Coast, we will evaluate and strengthen the complaints management committee and position it as a replicable model for other health facilities. In Kenya, we will support the Mathare community to co-design a model public school for Mabatini and Ngei wards, grounded in human rights standards. Building on our multi-country austerity study, we will drive national advocacy on financing for education and health: advancing reforms in Ghana; launching a fiscal policy and public services financing agenda in Kenya through the CESCR process and targeted coalition work; and, in Nigeria, using the new tax acts in force since 1 January 2026 to catalyse a national accountability campaign for adequately funded, quality public services. In Latin America, we will amplify locally led care pilots across 8 countries and turn lessons into influence—advancing care policies that strengthen care organisations, protect care workers’ rights, support unpaid caregivers, include disability and family networks, and redistribute care more equitably.