Global South Trade Unions Say Climate Finance Must Reclaim and Restore Public Assets and Services
November 17, 2024
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COP29 DECLARATION: Global South Trade Unions Say Climate Finance Must Reclaim and Restore Public Assets and Services
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We are trade unions representing over 100 million workers from Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean region.
As Global South trade unions, we support a public pathway approach to addressing climate change, one that requires a major policy shift away from the current “privatise to decarbonise” policy towards a bold pro-public framework.
We echo the calls made by the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC), and it’s regional bodies from Africa, Asia Pacific, and the Americas; Global Union Federations (GUFs); and other trade union bodies for COP29 to deliver levels of climate finance that are commensurate with, first, the unprecedented scale of the threat posed by climate change and, second, the historic responsibilities of the Global North that are recognised under the UNFCCC.
We support a response to the climate crisis that promotes global justice and respects and protects workers’ rights as outlined in the Just Transition Work Program (JTWP). We urge all Parties to develop and implement effective and actionable steps to ensure a just and equitable transition in the Global South.
The New Collective Quantified Goal (NCQG) and a New Era for Public Energy
We call on parties at the COP to acknowledge the essential role of public ownership and control over vital sectors essential to climate action and transition, such as energy, public transport, and raw materials. As noted in the ITUC’s Fifth World Congress statement adopted in November 2022, “Neoliberal climate and energy policies…which are tied to privatisation and commodification, have failed to halt the rise of greenhouse gas emissions.” The Congress called “for the retention, reclamation and expansion of public ownership of energy infrastructure and services,” a policy we fully support. We also support Trade Union Confederation of the America’s (TUCA’s) demand that “energy must be decommodified and democratised through changes in the ownership and management regimes, strengthening the public character and reorienting the role of public companies so that their management is democratic and focused on guaranteeing rights and better living conditions for the working population.” Furthermore, the NCQG must ensure that the delivery of all climate finance is shaped by mechanisms to advance public, democratic and transparent control, and be based on the recognition of the UNFCCC principle of Common But Differentiated Responsibilities.
Therefore, climate finance must be delivered in ways that can:
Prevent further debt, and relieve the immense pressures of existing debt, on South countries. Many South countries already pay more in debt servicing than they commit to health, education and basic services. Climate finance must maintain and expand these public services, which are vital to both mitigation and adaptation efforts.
End the policy of “blended finance” and “de-risking.” Since COP15 in 2009, the levels of capital committed has been, first, minimal and therefore inadequate and, second, most of the finances have been mobilised by the MDBs and is therefore public finance. The World Bank’s “billions to trillions” idea that public money would “catalyse” large amounts of private sector finance has been an unqualified failure. A NCQG must acknowledge that private investors will not provide the investment needed to reach climate and low-carbon energy targets, and the effectiveness of climate finance will be contingent on public institutions and public financing.
Move beyond market mechanisms such as carbon pricing and trading (which have been shown to be socially regressive and ecologically ineffective); and to finally see beyond offsets as a means to reduce emissions from deforestation and degradation (REDD and REDD+). As noted by TUCA’s COP29 statement, these policies have been promoted by “countries of the North and transnational corporations to be developed in the countries of the global South, deepen the crisis and promote the reproduction of colonialist practices, ignoring the differentiated responsibilities of the countries of the global North.”
Refrain from making the kind of attacks on the public sector common to Just Energy Transition Partnerships. Future proposals should not use language that favors and showcases the interests of private investors. They should instead use language that addresses core concerns of workers, communities, and the legitimate development needs of South countries
Permit and encourage a “reclaim and restore” approach to public services and utilities, and help South governments grow their assets and capacities, putting them in a stronger position to pursue low-carbon industrial and social development
Therefore our demands are as follows:
Developed countries must fulfill their historical responsibilities: They must deliverclimate finance to the Global South of at least $5 trillion annually. This climate finance must be new & additional, public, non-debt creating, adequate and predictable, and channeled through democratic, transparent, and accountable mechanisms. It must consist of grants rather than loans for climate-related loss and damage, and climate adaptation. Developed countries must also cancel (not reschedule) climate-related (e.g. debts to loss and damage to infrastructure, vital crop failures, etc.) and illegitimate debts to free up fiscal space for global South countries to respond to the climate crisis. Both climate finance and debt cancellation can be considered as part of the reparations the global North owes to the global South for their historical and continuing responsibility for the climate crisis.
Climate finance must be used to expand public assets: Unlike blended finance schemes like Just Energy Transition Partnerships (JETPs) which use public money to de-risk private investments while piling on governmental debt, the $5 trillion annual commitment should be targeted towards rebuilding the capacities of governments to reclaim their electricity and transport sectors to full public ownership and control. JETP-type conditionalities aimed at creating “an enabling environment for the private sector” through de-regulation, liberalisation, and the undermining of public companies must give way to “public pathway” approaches to a just energy transition.
Address Energy Poverty: The multilateral lending system should abandon its “privatise to decarbonise” agenda and openly endorse the “reclaim and restore” public energy utilities approach proposed by unions supporting the public pathway. The MDBs should stop favoring private companies (such as so-called independent power producers, or IPPs) while insisting on “full cost recovery” for public companies. Pioneered by the World Bank in the 1980s and 1990s, “structural adjustment” policies remain a feature of today’s climate finance schemes in that they make financing contingent upon reforms that promote private companies while striving to undermine public services and entities. This is the primary reason why in the Global South hundreds of millions of people still do not have access to clean and reliable electricity and billions still rely on dirty energy sources for cooking and heating.
Technology transfer is necessary for high value-added green industrialisation and low-carbon development: Additional finance must be directed towards the diversification of global supply chains through the transfer of technologies, technical assistance, and public-public partnerships based state-to-state cooperation on non-commercial terms. Today’s green industries are controlled by a handful of countries and multinational companies who are frequently more concerned about revenue streams, profits and market share than they are concerned about addressing the threat of climate change.
North should lead on managed decline of fossil fuel use. The JETPs’ focus on reducing coal-use in countries like Indonesia, South Africa and Vietnam avoids the reality that rich countries are major fossil fuel producers and exporters. The rich countries can, and should, take the lead in terms of reducing not just their consumption of fossil fuels but also their exports. This should be combined with providing developing country assistance to expedite the deployment of low-carbon energy alternatives, state-of-the-art approaches to energy efficiency, and the development of modern climate-resilient infrastructure and industrial practices.
Beyond Colonial Practices, a Publicly-Driven Future for the South
We believe that a just and equitable transition requires a strategic repositioning of the Global South away from the bottom of the global value chain. We are the global majority. We are home to the majority of the strategic minerals that are fueling the 21st century industries.
We call on our governments to form regional South-South joint industrial policies, with South-North cooperation to share and transfer life-saving technologies to manufacture and deploy renewable and other forms of low-carbon energy, modern public transportation services and infrastructure, etc., at scale in the Global South. These joint industrial policies must pre-negotiate the terms and conditions of a socially fair and ecologically sound extraction of minerals, the fair distribution of the value chain across the South and the equitable distribution of future prosperity based on first meeting basic needs. Green industrial policies in the Global South must avoid reproducing the same hierarchies, violence and socio-economic exclusions of the past. Those policies must recognise the centrality of workers in any production process and ensure compliance with rights and decent working conditions, and commit financing as a means to change the current production and consumption model. Absent radical changes in this extractivist, exploitative and wasteful model, decarbonisation targets will continue to be missed by wide margins.
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