COP31’s last week comes down to two words, “just transition”. Here is what they mean and who pays

Ninety-two thousand people have passed through the Antalya conference centre since Monday 9 November, the biggest attendance in the history of the UN climate summits. When ministers took over from officials this weekend, one of the hardest texts on their desks was barely two words long in its title: just transition.

It is a phrase that now appears in nearly every climate statement, from Canberra to Brussels to Pretoria. Most people have never had it explained.

What does “just transition” actually mean?

It means moving an economy off coal, oil and gas without dumping the cost on the workers, towns and countries that depend on them.

The term comes from the union movement, not the environmental one. North American unionist Tony Mazzocchi of the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers union pushed the idea in the 1990s: if society decides an industry must close for the common good, the workers in it should not be the ones who pay, and he called for a fund to support them while they retrained.

It moved from picket lines into treaty text over three decades:

| Year | Where | What happened | |—|—|—| | 2015 | Paris | The Paris Agreement’s preamble names “a just transition of the workforce” | | 2015 | Geneva | The International Labour Organization adopts its just transition guidelines | | 2018 | Katowice, Poland | Leaders sign the Silesia Declaration in the heart of Polish coal country | | 2021 | Glasgow | Rich nations pledge US$8.5 billion to help South Africa move off coal | | 2022 | Sharm el-Sheikh | Countries set up a Just Transition Work Programme | | 2025 | Belém | COP30 agrees to create a just transition mechanism | | 2026 | Antalya | COP31 is meant to decide how the mechanism works |

Why is Australia running these talks in Türkiye?

Because neither country would back down. Australia and Türkiye both bid to host COP31, and the deadlock was broken with an unusual split: Türkiye hosts the summit in Antalya and its environment minister Murat Kurum runs the voluntary “action agenda”, while Australia’s Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen holds the title President of Negotiations and steers the formal texts. The Pacific was promised a pre-COP meeting.

That means an Australian minister’s name sits on the drafts that 190-plus countries are fighting over this week. Bowen called the first just transition draft “comprehensive”. Civil society groups including Climate Action Network and Oil Change International called the proposed mechanism weak.

What would the mechanism actually do?

Under the draft, it would have two tiers: a political arm led by governments, and an implementation arm hosted or supported by the UN climate secretariat. Its main outputs would be a knowledge hub, reports, an annual meeting and a service that matches countries’ requests for help with support that already exists.

What it would not do, in the current draft, is raise or hand out new money. That is the heart of the fight.

Why are rich and poor countries split?

Because a coal mine closing in Indonesia or South Africa is not the same problem as one closing in Germany or the Hunter Valley.

Developing countries, led by the African Group, the G77 and China, and the least developed countries, want the mechanism to deliver technical help, technology transfer and “additional, predictable, grant-based” finance. South Africa has proposed a dedicated facility for just transition money. They also want the talks to tackle trade measures such as carbon border taxes, which they say penalise their exports while they are still industrialising.

The EU, Switzerland’s negotiating group and Japan want to use existing climate funds rather than build a new one, and the EU and UK want trade kept out of this room altogether.

There is a quieter split too. The EU insists on the words “food systems”; India and the G77 prefer “food production and food security”. In UN climate talks, a phrase decides whose farms are in scope.

Hasn’t this been tried with money before?

Yes, and the record explains why poorer countries do not trust promises. Since Glasgow, rich nations have signed “Just Energy Transition Partnerships” with South Africa (US$8.5 billion), Indonesia (US$20 billion) and Vietnam (US$15.5 billion). Much of that money came as loans rather than grants, delivery has been slow, and the United States withdrew from the partnerships in 2025.

At COP29 in Baku in 2024, countries set a goal of US$300 billion a year in climate finance for developing nations by 2035, alongside a call to scale all finance up to US$1.3 trillion. This week, campaigners criticised the EU for arriving in Antalya with no new finance commitments, and a COP31 pledging event for a Pacific resilience facility left it US$300 million short of its US$500 million target for 2026.

What does this mean for Australia?

Two things. Diplomatically, Bowen’s reputation as a deal-maker now rides on landing something that both the Pacific, which wants money and urgency, and the big emitters, which want neither, can accept.

At home, “just transition” is not abstract. The WA government has committed to retire its state-owned coal power stations by 2030, which puts Collie at the centre of Australia’s own version of the question. The Latrobe Valley has lived it since Hazelwood closed in 2017. Canberra set up the Net Zero Economy Authority to manage exactly this: new jobs and retraining for workers in closing coal and power regions. Whatever Antalya agrees will be held up against what Australia does in its own coal towns.

Can one country block a deal?

In practice, yes. UN climate decisions are made by consensus, which means no formal vote and no objection from the floor. That is why the summit’s closing nights are famous for missed deadlines, all-night sessions and texts stripped back to the words everyone can live with.

The Belém decision only asked Antalya to agree how the mechanism is set up. A thin result, a mechanism with a name, a structure and no money, is a real possibility.