A Just Transition Without Women Isn’t Just – Belém Risks Betrayal

As COP30 draws to a close in Belém, Brazil, the Amazon has hosted both historic ambition and familiar disappointment.

The 195 Parties approved the Belém Package — 29 decisions covering just transition, adaptation finance, trade, technology, gender and health. On the surface, this signals a victory for multilateralism: governments reached consensus, reaffirmed commitments and shifted global attention to implementation.

Yet beneath the celebrations lies a harsher truth. The summit pledged a just transition, but the mechanism adopted risks leaving behind the very communities it claims to protect. Workers in fossil-dependent regions, Indigenous peoples, women and frontline communities now face a future shaped not by concrete support but by voluntary promises, diluted language and financing that may never materialise. A just transition without feminist-informed finance is not a transition at all — it is a redistribution of burden, not opportunity.

The Belém Package did secure notable advances. Parties committed to tripling adaptation finance by 2035 and set a timeline for developed countries to substantially scale up support to developing nations. The Baku Adaptation Roadmap outlines work for 2026–2028 ahead of the next Global Stocktake. Negotiators agreed to 59 voluntary, non-prescriptive indicators to track progress across water, food, health, ecosystems, infrastructure and livelihoods, integrating finance, technology and capacity-building.

A Just Transition mechanism was formally adopted, framed around equity and people-centred climate action. It aims to enhance cooperation, technical assistance, capacity-building and knowledge-sharing — an acknowledgment that climate change is as much a socio-economic crisis as an environmental one. The Belém Health Action Plan, backed by USD300 million from the Climate and Health Funders Coalition, seeks to strengthen climate-resilient health systems in the Global South.

And yet, despite these formal commitments, glaring gaps remain. Workers in coal, oil and gas regions, Indigenous communities and other frontline groups cannot access a just transition without finance. The mechanism lacks a dedicated funding facility, a grant-based pipeline and enforceable safeguards. Language around fairness has been weakened; commitments remain aspirational. Without money flowing to people, "just transition" risks becoming a slogan rather than a reality.

The Gender Action Plan illustrates this mixture of progress and constraint. It recognises structurally excluded groups, mandates protection for women environmental defenders, integrates gender- and age-disaggregated data and strengthens coherence across UNFCCC bodies and the Rio Conventions. Yet core human rights language has been removed, and intersectionality appears only as a vague reference to "multidimensional factors." Crucially, it lacks a dedicated funding stream. Voluntary reporting through Biennial Transparency Reports cannot replace resources or political will.

Finance remains the defining fault line. The first call of the Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage — USD250 million for 2025–26 — has been hailed as historic, yet it is only a fraction of what vulnerable communities require. There are no guaranteed direct-access channels for women-led, Indigenous or grassroots organisations. Without such access, funds risk being captured by ministries, consultants or intermediaries, reproducing the very inequalities the fund seeks to remedy.

The Belém Package exposes the political calculus underpinning climate negotiations. Aspirations for equity, gender justice and social protection exist on paper, but structural power imbalances endure. Governments have shown they can agree — 195 Parties reached consensus — but they have not shown the courage to fund, enforce or operationalise a transition that is genuinely just. A feminist analysis makes the consequences clear: without direct finance and agency for women and frontline communities, the just transition will reinforce inequality, not dismantle it.

A truly just transition demands predictable, grant-based funding accessible to workers, unions, local governments and communities. It requires safeguards for gender and Indigenous rights. It requires mandatory transparency, so the public can see who receives funding, how it is used and who benefits. Without these foundations, adaptation finance, Loss and Damage support and commitments under the Gender Action Plan will remain symbolic.

Belém could have been a turning point — the first COP to fully integrate feminist principles into just transition frameworks. It could have demonstrated that climate justice is inseparable from gender justice, worker protections and Indigenous rights. Instead, it risks being remembered for rhetoric without resources, consensus without courage and promises without delivery.

The legacy of COP30 will not be the poetry of its declarations but whether frontline communities feel change. A just transition without women is not just. Without feminist-informed finance and enforceable mechanisms, the Amazon COP risks betraying not only workers and frontline communities, but the credibility of global climate governance itself.

History will judge Belém not by what negotiators said, but by what they funded, enabled and protected. The time to act is now. The just transition — and the women and communities it must empower — cannot wait.