Still image from a Bonn, Germany, press conference recording, including the Indigenous Environmental Network’s Thomas B.K. Goldtooth and Chief Ninawa Huni Kui and the Just Transition Alliance’s Fernando Tormos-Aponte, June 2025. Photo Credit: Global Campaign to Demand Climate Justice

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Just Transition Alliance (JTA) and Indigenous Environmental Network (IEN) delegates are on the ground in Belém, Brazil, to refuse false solutions that perpetuate environmental and climate colonialism; to call for a justice-based, frontline-led fossil fuel phaseout; and to ensure the implementation of legally binding and enforceable just transition decisions.

Led by veteran environmental justice movement organizers José T. Bravo and Thomas B.K. Goldtooth, respectively, JTA and IEN are participating in COP30 to call out the continued harms and lethality of an extractivist economy that violates human rights and the collective and inherent rights of Indigenous Peoples. Our organizations are advancing a policy agenda and movement mobilizations that center Indigenous Just Transition Principles, including Indigenous sovereignty, Free, Prior, and Informed Consent (FPIC), the United Nation Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), and the ethical use of Indigenous Traditional Knowledge. We are committed to and follow the Principles of Just Transition, the Principles of Environmental Justice, the Bali Principles of Climate Justice, and the Jemez Principles for Democratic Organizing.

We demand democratic participation in climate decision-making processes, including those focused on just transition. Robust transnational inclusion requires centering, listening to, ethically learning from, and following the lead of affected peoples, who have real solutions, informed by their frontline experiences, knowledges, and practices. These real solutions include pathways for eradicating economic and other forms of oppression and injustice, while ensuring decent work and promoting care economies and relationships that nourish life for future generations.

We call for differentiated, non-debt-creating, and direct funding. The most impacted peoples and groups are very diverse and should have the agency and self-determination to manage their own funds directly, as they know their lived realities and needs best. In addition to direct funding, just transition requires technology transfers, capacity building, and knowledge sharing. 

We oppose false solutions that delay the essential phase-out of fossil fuels and perpetuate environmental, climate, and energy injustices, violence, and other harms with a greenwashed veneer. These false solutions include nature-based “solutions,” like carbon offsets, as well as carbon capture and storage, geoengineering, and so-called “clean” hydrogen, among others. Climate “finance” upholds market regimes that fuel the environmental and climate colonialism that created the injustices that Indigenous Peoples, frontline workers, and affected communities, including Afro-descendants, disproportionately experience.

Throughout the negotiations, we will raise our voices to insist that wealthy countries and corporate polluters be held accountable for their grave harms and continued violence against Indigenous Peoples, frontline workers, and fenceline communities in the Global South and in the Global South of the North. We demand and will accept nothing less than a frontline-led, legally-binding just transition! 

**JTA and IEN delegates and other organizational members are available for media inquiries and interviews.**

Media Contacts:

Catalina de Onís
Just Transition Alliance (JTA)
catalina@jtalliance.org
www.jtalliance.org

JoKay Dowell
Indigenous Environmental Network (IEN)
jokay@ienearth.org
www.ienearth.org 

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