Photo credit: Solidarity Center/Narek Harutyunyan
Workers provide the labour that makes climate mitigation and adaptation efforts possible. Generating renewable energy, operating decarbonized transportation systems, retrofitting buildings, managing waste and recycling, providing essential care and services, and restoring and preserving ecosystems.
Yet although their labour is essential to powering a transition to greener economies and societies, workers and their organizations are too often excluded from key operational and financial decision-making spaces that determine how these transitions will happen and whom they will benefit. Women, migrant workers, and workers across Global Majority countries are further distanced from meaningful climate governance when transition debates center technocratic interventions or narrow energy targets.
In this context, what does meaningful worker participation look like in just transition debates and how are workers involved in green transformations for specific sectors? How might we address governance gaps?
WIEGO is co-hosting an event at New York Climate Week 2026 with Working Horizons, Solidarity Center, the Avina Foundation and the Global Fund for a New Economy to explore how meaningful worker participation in just transition planning and governance can accelerate climate action and build resilience for impacted communities.
The panel will discuss:
- the role of workers’ organizations in industrial and sectoral transformations;
- how gender-inclusive decision-making is central to delivering climate action;
- identify opportunities for addressing governance gaps; and
- examples from ongoing just transition and climate governance advocacy, including in relation to the Belém–Antalya Mechanism (BAM), national and regional transition planning, and workplace or sectoral bargaining.
The BAM is a proposed UN framework designed to ensure the global transition away from fossil fuels protects workers, local communities and vulnerable populations, rather than leaving them behind.
About New York City Climate Week 2026
Climate Week NYC, hosted by Climate Group, is the world’s largest climate event and a global platform for advancing climate and economic progress.
It brings together more than 100,000 people, including leaders across business, government, finance and civil society, across more than 1,000 events.
This year’s Climate Week NYC will focus on the energy, the impact, and the action required to remove the barriers to climate progress and deliver change at speed and scale.
Register to attend in person
