No Just Transition without Climate and Trade Justice!
IBON International Statement for the First Climate and Trade Dialogue
This year, the Subsidiary Bodies of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) are meeting in Bonn, Germany, for their 64th session (SB64). Among the most anticipated events is the inaugural dialogue on climate and trade, mandated to provide a space for discussing the role of trade in climate action. While such a dialogue signifies a recognition of the interconnectedness of climate and trade policies, particularly in the context of the transition away from fossil fuels, any meaningful discussion on this matter must begin with a reckoning of the historic and ongoing inequalities embedded in the global economy that have driven multiple crises.
For centuries, countries in the global South have been integrated into the global economy as suppliers of raw materials and sites of cheap labour, while control over finance, technology, and higher-value production remains in Northern economies. This dynamic has syphoned off resources from the South to the North, primarily through unequal trade and investment regimes. As a result, power and wealth generated from the plunder of the commons have been consolidated in the global North and their corporations and allied local elites, while the impacts of the resulting climate and social crises are disproportionately borne by working peoples in the South.
These inequalities are reinforced through the appropriation of peoples’ demands for a transition away from fossil-based and extractive economic systems to advance new forms of extraction and accumulation. Central to this process is the reorganisation of the trade and investment regimes to push the global South to further liberalise supply chains and remain locked into the role of raw material exporters.
This is unfolding within intensifying geopolitical competition, mainly motivated by the United States (US) and its allies’ efforts to maintain their dominance amid China’s leading position in the processing and manufacturing of many transition-related resources. To preserve their economic and military advantage, Northern economies are scrambling to consolidate control over strategic supply chains through aggressive trade and investment policies, particularly around minerals deemed “critical” to renewable energy and digital infrastructures, as well as advanced weapons systems.
In particular, the US is pursuing this agenda through a range of trade and investment initiatives aimed at securing access to inputs. These include so-called “strategic partnership arrangements” designed to lock in access to resources and strengthen corporate control over production networks across the global South. One example is Pax Silica, a US-led approach that seeks to expand the extraction and export of raw materials from resource-rich countries, backed by the threat of tariffs on their imports.
Likewise, climate-related unilateral trade measures have emerged as another instrument in the ongoing restructuring of global trade. The most prominent of these is the European Union’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM), which functions as a “green” tariff on exports from countries whose production processes do not meet European standards. This shifts the costs of decarbonisation onto the global South, who are compelled to comply in order to maintain access to Northern markets. More importantly, this measure ignores the longstanding failure of Northern countries to provide the resources required to support a just transition.
Taken together, these measures reveal the relentless pursuit of power and wealth by the world’s most powerful countries and corporations. They deepen the very inequalities that underpin the climate crisis while once again displacing the heaviest burdens onto working peoples in the global South, who are forced to contend with intensifying land grabbing, labour exploitation, displacement, militarisation, human rights violations, and ecosystem degradation.
Whether the dialogues in Bonn will be able to confront these realities remains an open question. Absent such a reckoning, it risks becoming another venue for greenwashing the same systems that plunder the global South and drive ecological destruction. These concerns are only heightened by the involvement of the World Trade Organisation and other trade and investment institutions that have historically promoted liberalisation, privatisation, and deregulation that erode policy space and weaken much-needed public services, especially during climate impacts.
Therefore, the challenge before the dialogue is not to make the existing trade regime “green.” Rather, it must begin by recognising the structural inequalities that have produced the climate crisis and supporting a just transition towards sovereign and people-centred economies. This includes advancing genuine agrarian reform, food sovereignty, national industrialisation, public control and ownership, and the right of peoples to pursue their development pathways.
For peoples’ movements and civil society, the urgent task is to strengthen cross-movement solidarity and action in and out of these processes. This means bringing to the fore the development aspirations of peoples who have long borne the impacts of crises they did little to cause and advancing a common agenda for climate and trade justice.
