Equitable transition

Climate justice intersects with other major systems of inequality and injustice in our world, including global racism. Access to environmental resources, environmental health outcomes, and experiences of environmental change are all affected by one’s identity.

Environmental racism takes place within pathways to global net zero when indigenous peoples and people in the Global South are forced from their communities in the name of a crisis for which they are historically not responsible.

Negative impacts of the climate crisis have been shown to disproportionately affect populations in the Global South, indigenous communities, people of colour, and women. Vulnerable populations overall, who have restricted access to resources, are expected to suffer more severe consequences sooner than those with greater access to resources.

In the absence of widespread regulation, net zero standards are critical to the governance of voluntary corporate greenhouse gas reduction (Hale et al., 2024).   Net zero governance initiatives are increasingly converging on key elements of best practice that are being consolidated across the net zero ‘conveyor belt’ into policy and regulation. We have kept a keen eye on what constitutes ‘best practice’ over the years, and our systematic mapping report earlier this year involved a comprehensive analysis across 37 initiatives (Becker et al, 2024).  

Corporate actors remain the largest influence on the substance of net zero standards, while those most affected by carbon emissions are often excluded from the standards development process – an example of procedural injustice (Bell and Carrick 2017; Valenzuela and Lezaun, 2024). No single demographic will be more affected by today’s decisions on how we achieve net zero than youth, especially those from the most climate-vulnerable countries. Voluntary standards represent one important lever in the global governance architecture, guiding corporations and other non-state actors in their net zero commitments and decarbonisation efforts that will ensure a liveable planet for future generations. And yet, while voluntary standards have proliferated in the last five years, both youth and climate justice perspectives have consistently been under-represented in making and implementing these standards. As a result, existing patterns of power and influence are repeated across net-zero governance landscapes and into our net-zero futures.  

 One consequence of the missing voice of young leaders in the climate justice movement is that guidance around how corporations can contribute to a just transition has been missing or remains very high-level and vague, as we found in our recent mapping of 37 governance guidance documents (Becker et al, 2024). We found that value-laden or normative aspects of net zero, including best practice approaches for “justice and equity-aligned” implementation of net zero strategies are still either missing from the governance landscape, or too vague to implement.  

In partnership with the British Standards Institution, we assembled a Youth Advisory Board, made up of 12 young people from 11 countries, to develop their capacity to engage on standards. At the same time, we worked with this expert Board to help develop technical criteria for corporates to include in their transition plans to be more justice and equity aligned. We published this research at London Climate Action Week 2025.