by Ambet Yuson, BWI General Secretary

Belém mattered for many reasons. For the first time, a COP took place in the Amazon, a region whose workers, forests, and communities have long carried the weight of a crisis they did not create. It was also the moment when years of organising and campaigning by construction and forestry unions affiliated to BWI across continents converged around two urgent fronts of climate injustice: extreme heat and the protection of workers whose livelihoods depend on the world’s forests. This first reflection focuses on heat and its impact on the workers who build our cities, harvest our forests, and repair our communities after climate-related disasters.

In many ways, we have come a long way. In the first Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Overview and its 1992 Supplement, there were no references to workers, no recognition of how carbon emissions are unevenly distributed by income within countries, and the only reference to heat was limited to its role in spreading infections.

By 2015, the Paris Agreement acknowledged “the imperatives of a just transition of the workforce and the creation of decent work and quality jobs.” Yet this language was confined to the preamble, after delegates rejected proposals from BWI and the global labour movement to include a more substantive reference in the body of the agreement. The preamble also included the concept of “intergenerational equity”, but without addressing who bears the risks of transition in the present

The 2023 Climate Change Synthesis Report by the IPCC marked another step forward. It recognised that the wealthiest 10% of households account for 34-45% of global consumption-based greenhouse gas emissions, while the poorest 50% contribute only 13-15%. It also documented the rising toll of heatwaves and heat-related human mortality. Yet even then, the links remained largely unspoken: between emissions inequality and income inequality, and between a warming planet and the daily occupational risks faced by workers exposed to extreme heat.

This is why Belém represents a turning point. BWI and the global labour movement leave COP30 with concrete advances:

• A labour-led mechanism, the Belém Action Mechanism for Just Transition (BAM), that will shape how climate policies affect workers.
• A global negotiation track where heat and worker protection are now firmly anchored.
• A growing coalition of governments, cities, international financiers, and UN agencies that now see heat stress as a central adaptation challenge.
• And a base of affiliates more mobilised and united than ever.

For the first time in the history of the UNFCCC, workers will have a formal space in the governance of climate action: a recognition that climate policy cannot be credible without labour rights, social dialogue, and decent work at its core.

By gaining recognition on the international level for worker’s occupational safety and health, we reinforce the actions of our national affiliates and local partners to win concrete protections on the job and in their communities.

For too many of our members, climate change is real. It is the burn of steel too hot to touch, the strain of toiling under a burning sun, and the choice between earning a day’s wage or risking future disease.

Over the past years, BWI affiliates have mobilised across hundred of countries to win the right to water, shade, rest, medical checks, and safe schedules. They have filed OSH complaints, negotiated collective agreements, marched for rights and protections, and forced employers and governments to confront a truth they long resisted:

“No climate justice plan is credible if workers continue collapsing on the job.”

These efforts came together in our ‘Too Hot to Work’ campaign, powered by collective agreements, national laws, heat protocols, and awareness actions across the Gulf, Asia-Pacific, Latin America, and Europe, and reinforced by the demands we brought to COP30 to protect outdoor workers in the Global Goal on Adaptation, National Adaptation Plans, and adaptation finance.

In Belém, our affiliates showed up not as visitors, but as a movement shaping the adaptation agenda. From the ILO Pavilion to the EBRD Heat Resilience Exchange, workers’ testimonies were heard, recorded, and repeated by allies, institutions, and negotiators. Again and again, we made the same point: worker protection is not a side issue of adaptation. It is adaptation.

Let’s be clear. On heat stress, we did not win everything we fought for. Some governments resisted explicit labour and OSH indicators under the Global Goal on Adaptation. Language linked to worker protection was watered down, and other indicators were removed during the last hours of negotiations, at real cost to millions of outdoor workers.

But progress was made. Against a backdrop of geopolitical paralysis and finance disputes, worker-relevant elements held their ground. Heat exposure, early warning systems, occupational health outcomes, and the resilience of essential services for communities and workers are now firmly part of the adaptation debate. These were not previously accepted as part of the global monitoring architecture. Now they are in the room and cannot be erased.

Equally important, the final text on National Adaptation Plans recognises the need for inclusive governance, attention to vulnerable groups, and integration of adaptation into labour policies. It also emphasises the centrality of risk data, monitoring systems, and finance, commitments that unions can use to press for real protections at national level.

This is not a symbolic gain. It will shape how countries integrate labour standards into adaptation and heat protection. It creates a home for our demands inside the UN system. And it gives us a mandate to push for what governments did not deliver in Belém.

While we achieved more in Belem than any other prior COP we have much yet to obtain.

COP30 did not solve heat stress. But thanks to years of organising by our affiliates, what was once ignored is now recognized as a systemic risk to workers, to economies and to societies.

Our work continues, in the ILO, in national parliaments, in collective bargaining, and in communities already battered by climate extremes. The next round of negotiations is underway, and workers will be there again, stronger and more organised.

We are not bystanders to climate change. We are the first to feel its heat and the last to be heard. But we will be heard. We will demand that those who benefited the most from creating the climate crisis contribute the most to resolving it. And we will insist that decent work includes workers’ voices in how work is organised, so that the planet is protected from greed and unsustainable development that values profits and devalues workers.

It is impossible to comprehend and address the climate crisis without asking what we produce, how we produce, and for whom we produce. These questions are not secondary, the are central to any real solution. Today, the Global South contributes the vast majority of the world’s labour, yet it receives only a fraction of global income in return, while countries with the highest historical emissions continue to enjoy far higher per-capita consumption. The injustice of climate change is not only geographical, it is also profoundly social.

Workers cannot continue to pay the price for historic carbon emissions that built wealth for a few while exposing millions to danger, whether in the Global North or the Global South.

And we will not stop until every construction worker, every forestry worker, and every outdoor worker can work in safety and dignity, without risking their life, their health, or the future of their families and their communities.

Because adaptation must begin with people who do the work, where the work is done.

And no transition is “just” unless it protects those who build it.