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COP30 introduced a new global Just Transition Mechanism, a framework meant to protect workers and communities as the world accelerates away from fossil fuels.
It sounded momentous, the kind of policy breakthrough climate summits are expected to deliver. A global commitment to fairness. A promise that no worker, in no community, would be left behind.
But outside the air-conditioned halls, in the coalfields of Mpumalanga, the gas belt of Mozambique, or the oil terminals of the Gulf of Guinea, that announcement had little impact. The mechanism comes without funding. No guarantee of reskilling. No safety net. No labour insurance. No community transition fund.
A mechanism without money is not a plan.
It is a suggestion, and a fragile one.
For African workers, who stand at the frontlines of the global energy transition, the question now is painfully simple:
Will the COP30 Just Transition Mechanism actually change anything?
The promise of a mechanism and the reality behind it
The Just Transition Mechanism is being framed as the world’s answer to growing labour anxiety. It is described as a global coordination hub, a set of guiding principles, and a new reporting platform for countries to detail their plans for workers as fossil fuels decline.
But look closely at what it offers and what it does not, and the gap becomes clear.
What it offers:
- A political mandate to protect workers
- A formal space for unions and labour ministries
- Guidance on social protection
- Encouragement to create national transition plans
- A shared global framework
What it does not offer:
- Dedicated funding
- Retraining programmes
- Income protection
- Community compensation
- Labour market guarantees
- Enforcement mechanisms
This is the paradox:
The world has acknowledged the human cost of the transition, but has not decided to pay for it.
In Africa, where labour markets are already fragile and fossil jobs often support entire communities, this omission casts a long shadow.
Africa’s labour crisis didn’t begin at COP30 and it won’t end there
The energy transition may be global, but its labour impact is deeply uneven.
The International Labour Organization (ILO) estimates that millions of African workers are employed directly or indirectly in fossil-fuel industries, from coal mining to oil refining to gas logistics.
But the decline is already underway:
- South Africa is decommissioning coal stations faster than new industries absorb workers.
- Nigeria has lost oil jobs for more than a decade as investment collapses.
- Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire’s offshore sectors face uncertain long-term demand.
- Mozambique’s LNG build-out has stalled amid financial volatility.
Meanwhile, the green economy is not yet delivering jobs at scale.
The IEA expects clean-energy technologies to create 30 million new jobs by 2030, yet only a sliver will be in Africa without targeted investment.
The IRENA 2024 jobs report shows 16.2 million renewable workers globally, but Africa remains largely absent.
The result?
Africa is being pushed out of one global labour market before it is invited into the next.
COP30’s mechanism recognises this imbalance with diplomatic language. But recognition is not protection.
For African workers, the transition is not “Just”, it is urgent
The world imagines the transition in timelines: 2030, 2050, 2060.
Workers in Africa experience it in bills paid or not paid; contracts renewed or not renewed; shifts assigned or quietly cancelled. The transition is not theoretical. It is Thursday afternoon when a supervisor tells a team the plant will close early next year, and the company has no retraining plan.
For a coal truck driver in Emalahleni, a refinery technician in Port Harcourt, or a pipefitter in Pemba, a “just transition” must be more than a slogan. It is the difference between descent and dignity.
What COP30 did, to its credit, is make labour impossible to ignore.
What it failed to do is make protection inevitable.
Why the mechanisms still matters if Africa uses it strategically
A mechanism without funding is not entirely powerless. It can still be a lever.
1. It gives unions new negotiating power
African unions can now push governments and companies to:
- publish transition plans,
- guarantee retraining,
- include workers in decision-making.
“COP30 requires this” is a powerful bargaining tool.
2. It forces transparency
Most African governments have no public roadmaps for fossil-dependent regions. The mechanism requires reporting. Reporting creates accountability.
3. It provides a global standard
Companies operating in Africa can no longer ignore transition obligations they follow in Europe or Australia.
4. It opens space for community demands
Communities in mining and oil regions can demand CBAs —community benefit agreements, tied directly to COP30 principles.
Equity cannot be afterthought.
What African governments must now do, fast
The real question is not whether COP30 delivered enough. It didn’t.
The question is whether African states seize the moment to lead.
Here’s what must happen immediately:
1. National Just Transition Commissions
South Africa has one.
Kenya, Nigeria, Ghana, Senegal, Mozambique must follow.
These commissions must map:
- job losses
- future skill needs
- retraining pathways
- community transition plans
2. Embed skills into every energy project
No new solar park, hydrogen hub, or gas field should proceed without a skills and worker-transition budget.
This is the heart of Energy Transition Africa’s ongoing work on the continent’s skills as infrastructure crisis.
3. Negotiate for transition finance at G20, AfDB and COP31
Developed economies cannot preach justice while underfunding it.
Transition without jobs is instability.
Instability is expensive.
Investment is cheaper than unrest.
4. Protect workers in state-owned utilities
Utility transitions, from Eskom to Tanesco, will create more labour turbulence than coal mines. Planning must begin now.
What unions and civil society must seize now
1. Use COP30 as a legal and moral basis
The mechanism gives legitimacy to labour demands.
2. Organise community-transition campaigns
Communities must not wait to be “consulted”.
They must shape the process.
3. Monitor government commitments
The mechanism requires reporting.
Workers must track, and contest, what gets filed.
4. Demand national budget lines
A transition without funding is not a transition, it is abandonment.
A final reflection: the transition will be just only if we make it so
The COP30 Just Transition Mechanism is not the solution African workers hoped for.
But it is a beginning, fragile, incomplete, symbolic, yet still a beginning.
What happens next will be determined not by the text of a UN decision, but by what unions demand, what governments prioritise, what industries negotiate, and what communities insist upon.
A global transition built on the back of unprotected labour is neither just nor durable.
Africa’s workers do not fear the transition.
They fear being ignored by it.
And now that the world has acknowledged their place in the story, they must not be written out of its next chapter.
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