Australia's blind spot: Human rights in the climate transition
Shannon Hobbs and Fiona David
Held at the gateway to the Amazon rainforest, this year’s COP in Belém, Brazil helped to bring a new and very welcome focus to global climate discussions. That is, our shared need to grapple with precisely how we treat people in the energy transition.
For the first time, this year’s COP included a dedicated thematic day on justice and human rights, alongside equally critical topics such as finance, science and technology.
Brazil’s experience of the interconnections between climate change and human rights abuses runs deep and wide.
For example, the links between deforestation and slave labour are well documented in Brazil. People who are recruited and exploited in the Amazon rainforest have been subjected to forced labour as part of illegal deforestation. This is occurring in the context of the Brazilian Amazon’s change into a net carbon emitter, releasing nearly 20% more carbon dioxide over the past decade than it has absorbed.
From 2003, Brazil’s Labour Inspectorate has pioneered and deployed mobile task forces to identify and remove workers from forced labour, whether on farms, in mining or in the forests. One of their largest operations in 2024 freed 50 people from an illegal deforestation site in southern Amazonas. Even today, Brazil’s government publishes a “Dirty List” of employers found by government inspectors to be subjecting workers to slave labour.
No surprise then that concepts of equality and human rights are at the heart of Brazil’s national climate plan (its Nationally Determined Contribution or NDC). Each country's NDC is key, as it documents that country's level of climate ambition, but also how it plans to organise the transition in its national context. Brazil has pledged to pursue “climate justice” while advancing human rights, particularly for Indigenous peoples and vulnerable groups.
Climate justice starts from the right of each country to economic and social development, but interweaves key human rights and environmental principles, including mitigation and adaptation but also reparations and the need for transformation in inherently exploitative systems.
Consider how Vanuatu, one of our Pacific neighbours, has written its national climate plan, making a commitment that “no NDC-aligned activity leads to human or environmental rights violations, whether inside or outside its borders, on land or on the deep sea bed,” with special reference to critical minerals in renewable energy supply chains.
How does this compare to what we know about how Australia plans to organise its transition plan, considered through the lens of climate justice?
Rapid decarbonisation is central to any notion of climate justice. Australia’s recently released national climate plan includes a commitment to reduce emissions between 62-70% compared to 2005 levels across all industries.
But other human rights principles are also important. These include non-discrimination, or the need to ensure inequalities are not exacerbated by climate change, and a “just transition”, in which costs and benefits are carefully managed and equitably shared. Equally important is the concept of international solidarity.
Australia’s climate plan includes commitments to support the growth of green jobs and skills at home, and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples' leadership at home. These are critical inclusions that need enormous focus, if we are to avoid entrenching inequalities like energy poverty right here in Australia.
But when it comes to upholding human rights principles more comprehensively in the transition, including through our trade and aid policy, or those workers in the global supply chains that we rely on, Australia’s commitments fall short. Australia’s NDC makes only a passing reference to human rights, buried in the appendix, without explaining how these rights will actually be protected. Australia, unlike Brazil and every other OECD country, does not have constitutional or other national human rights law.
Making rights real in the transition
The language of human rights can seem exclusionary, conjuring up notions of unrealistic, unachievable high standards. But in simple terms, human rights are about how people experience safety, dignity and justice in their daily lives.
Consider the principle of just transition. In Australia, we have our own live examples of farmers protesting and chaining gates to stop energy companies accessing their land. The conflict is not whether the transition happens but where and how it happens, and who benefits or loses as a result.
While other human rights principles of non-discrimination or international solidarity might seem abstract, they are easy to understand if we think about who digs and makes the critical minerals and materials we rely on to scale renewable technology.
For example, solar panels are a cornerstone of Australia’s renewable energy future, but UN assessments and independent research suggest these supply chains involve Chinese state-sponsored forced labour of Uyghur people. While denied by the Government of China, claims for and against are very difficult to verify, given geopolitical tensions and increasing restrictions on independent auditing in the Chinese context.
The Guardian obtained Australian government data on imports from companies that are named in the U.S. Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act Entity List, companies which the US says mine, produce, or manufacture goods with Uyghur-related forced labor. Imports from these companies are banned in the US. On our calculations, between 2020 and 2024, 2,278 imports from entities in solar and battery supply chains on that list entered Australia.
Wind turbines are another key technology in Australia’s renewable energy transition plan, whose supply chains also carry serious human rights risks amid the mining of rare earths. Myanmar produces around 8% of the global supply from Kachin State, which is controlled by non-state armed groups. These armed groups often facilitate illegal mining to fund their operations, and the conditions for workers are dangerous and inhuman. Rare earths are then imported by China, where they become part of global supply chains for renewable energy.
These issues are not unique to the energy transition, but the scale of “at risk” materials being imported, and the pace of change, is. Yet Australia currently has no process in place for checking the labour standards that sit behind products that we import, including solar panels and wind turbines.
Human rights violations in renewable energy supply chains are happening right now. So too are the impacts of climate change and the urgent need to address them. The question that governments of wealthy countries, including Australia, are yet to grapple with is how we can collectively enable a rapid transition while also tackling inequality, and respecting basic human rights in that process.
Broadening our focus to include a focus on climate justice, both in our own transition but in the ways Australia's transition will impact countries in the Global South, would be a very good start.
