Climate Justice at UNGA 81: Can the Global South Reshape the Just Transition?

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Marianna Albuquerque

September 23, 2026

The author of this opinion, Marianna Albuquerque, is a 2022 alumna of the Atlantic Dialogues Emerging Leaders Program.

As world leaders gather in New York for the 81st United Nations General Assembly, climate change returns to the center of multilateral diplomacy under markedly different circumstances. The debate is no longer confined to whether the world must decarbonize, but increasingly centers on how the transition will happen, who will bear its costs, who will capture its opportunities, and who will have a meaningful voice in defining its direction.

This makes UNGA 81 particularly consequential. The General Assembly takes place as the international community confronts the implications of overshooting 1.5°C, while geopolitical tensions, economic insecurity and an energy crisis place multilateral cooperation under growing pressure.

There is a notable convergence in this year’s UN agenda. The UN Secretary-General will convene a High-Level Event on Climate Action and the Just Transition, on September 23, where adaptation, finance, energy and green industrialization will be discussed as interconnected challenges. On that same day, the General Assembly will hold a high-level meeting marking the 40th anniversary of the Declaration on the Right to Development. Adopted in 1986, the Declaration places meaningful participation, equality of opportunity and the fair distribution of the benefits of development at the heart of the international agenda. Four decades later, those principles resonate directly with one of the defining questions of climate politics: can a transition be considered just if it decarbonizes the global economy without changing how opportunities, capabilities and value are distributed within it? For the Global South, climate justice and the right to development should therefore not be treated as competing agendas.

Another transition is also taking place at the United Nations itself. António Guterres will leave office at the end of 2026 after making climate action a defining feature of his tenure. The selection of his successor will matter for the political weight given to climate action within the UN system in the years ahead. The process carries broader symbolic and geopolitical significance. The UN has never been led by a woman, and Latin America and the Caribbean have a particularly prominent presence among the current candidates. The first two informal Security Council straw polls have also drawn attention to two women from the region. Costa Rica’s Rebeca Grynspan received the most “encourage” votes in the first round, while Guyana’s Carolyn Rodrigues-Birkett received the most in the second. The polls are informal, their results are not officially released by the Council, and the process remains open. Still, the prominence of these candidacies is noteworthy.

At a moment when the Global South is seeking greater influence over the rules and priorities of global governance, the UN is entering a new leadership cycle. The question is not only whether climate action will remain high on the agenda after Guterres, but whose understanding of climate action will shape the next phase.

Justice must mean development

The language of a “just transition” is now firmly established in climate diplomacy. However, there is still considerable disagreement over what justice actually requires. For many developing countries, justice cannot simply mean compensating workers and communities for the social costs of decarbonization. The transition is taking place in societies that must simultaneously expand energy access, create jobs, reduce poverty, build infrastructure and adapt to climate impacts to which they have contributed relatively little. Climate policy is, in that sense, inseparable from development policy.

This becomes especially clear when finance enters the equation. Multilateral development banks committed a record $163 billion in climate finance in 2025, including $103 billion for low- and middle-income economies. Nevertheless, scale alone tells only part of the story. Finance must also be accessible, predictable and responsive to countries’ needs. For countries already constrained by high debt burdens and elevated costs of capital, the ability to invest in resilience and clean infrastructure can be severely limited. A transition financed predominantly through expensive capital risks deepening precisely the inequalities climate justice is supposed to address. The architecture, cost and purpose of climate finance therefore matter as much as headline volumes.

A just transition must also create value

The same logic applies to the emerging green economy. Electrification, renewable energy, batteries, green hydrogen and other low-carbon technologies are creating new global value chains and increasing demand for critical minerals, many of which are located in developing countries.

This presents an enormous opportunity. But it also creates a familiar risk. If countries in the Global South export lithium, nickel, graphite or other transition minerals while importing higher-value technologies produced elsewhere, decarbonization could reproduce longstanding patterns of commodity dependence. The energy system would change, but the underlying distribution of economic value might not. The UNGA briefing itself warns against reproducing extractive models through renewable energy and transition-mineral development and emphasizes the need to respect human rights, Indigenous Peoples’ rights and Free, Prior and Informed Consent.

The implication should go further. A just transition should not merely extract differently; it should create opportunities differently. Developing countries need greater capacity to participate across clean-energy value chains, through processing, manufacturing, technological cooperation, research, skills and innovation. Accelerating electrification requires not only renewable generation but also grids, regulation, finance, critical minerals and human capabilities. A genuinely just transition must therefore also be a value-creating transition.

There is no single Global South transition

This does not mean that the Global South speaks with one voice. Brazil, India, Morocco, South Africa, Indonesia, small island developing states and fossil-fuel-producing developing economies face profoundly different transition pathways. Their energy systems, fiscal capacities, industrial structures and climate vulnerabilities vary considerably.

That diversity is sometimes portrayed as a weakness. It can also be a source of political innovation if the objective is understood not as replacing a Northern model of transition with a single Southern model. Rather, developing countries can help establish principles that allow differentiated transition pathways while protecting common priorities: development, resilience, affordability, access to technology, environmental integrity and meaningful participation.

This matters because the legitimacy of climate action increasingly depends on whether people see it as responding to their material concerns. Energy affordability, food prices, employment, heat, resilience and economic security are not distractions from climate policy. They are part of its political economy. The UNGA briefing similarly argues that climate action must offer solutions to the problems people care about, including energy and food affordability, livelihoods and security. Climate justice therefore cannot be reduced to a negotiation between governments over burden-sharing. It must also ask what the transition delivers for societies.

From participation to agenda-setting

This brings us back to the unusual convergence at UNGA 81.

Forty years after the Declaration on the Right to Development, participation in development cannot simply mean taking part in an economic transformation whose terms have already been determined elsewhere. Applied to climate governance, the same principle should mean having a voice in determining what is produced, where value is created, how technologies are shared and which development pathways remain available.

For decades, much of the Global South’s engagement with multilateral institutions has focused, understandably, on representation. Representation remains essential, but the next step is agenda-setting. This requires broadening the metrics of a successful transition: emissions reductions and renewable-energy capacity remain indispensable, but so are resilience, affordable energy, quality employment, productive capabilities, technological development and the distribution of value along green supply chains.

It also requires connecting mitigation more closely with adaptation and loss and damage. Climate justice has little meaning for communities already confronting floods, droughts, extreme heat or sea-level rise if the international system focuses overwhelmingly on future emissions but remains unable to respond adequately to present impacts. UNGA 81 appropriately places greater emphasis on accessible and scaled-up adaptation and resilience finance for countries and communities facing the greatest risks.

UNGA 81, therefore, arrives at an unusual moment of convergence. The world is moving from climate commitments toward the harder politics of implementation. The United Nations is preparing for a leadership transition of its own. And forty years after recognizing development as a right, the international community is confronting a transformation that will profoundly affect who has access to resources, technology and economic opportunity.

The Global South does not need to offer a single model for the just transition. Its more important contribution may be to challenge the assumption that one model can fit all. A rights-based transition must also be development-oriented; a green transition must also create economic capabilities; and climate finance must enable transformation rather than reproduce dependency. Ultimately, the Global South should not be asked merely to join a transition designed elsewhere. It should help define what that transition is meant to achieve.

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