The BWI European Conference on Just Transition in the Built Environment (Berlin, 6–7 October 2025) brought together more than 100 union leaders, city officials, NGOs, and partners to chart a path for a fair climate transition.

Over two days, participants tackled the challenges of ensuring that Europe’s net-zero goals create decent work and affordable housing, against any form of precarity and displacement:

• Climate action, from global to local: Panelists called for world leaders’ commitments and adaptation financing to flow to frontline communities and outdoor workers who are among the most exposed to climate risks. They also underlined the mitigation potential of decarbonising infrastructure and Europe’s ageing housing stock to reach Europe’s 2050 climate neutrality targets, and a chance to create millions of new green jobs, but warned that without strong labour standards, it risks becoming “just transition washing”, where decarbonisation is used to justify de-unionising or casualising work.
• City partnerships: Case studies from C40-BWI Vienna, London, and Glasgow showed how city–union alliances can deliver clean construction, affordable housing, and secure jobs, while improving protections for frontline communities (women, migrants, low-income workers, and households). At the same time, these alliances help upgrade good green jobs to counteract the spread of precarity, informality, and stagnant wages that make the sector unattractive to youth and women.
• Heat and collective bargaining: Unions shared examples of joint union-employer protocols in construction and collective agreements like those negotiated by tower crane operators, roofers, and scaffolders in Europe, that allow work stoppages, compensations, and protections during extreme heat. They called for these protections to be expanded and enforced through regulation and stronger labour inspections, to ensure workers’ rights are upheld as temperatures rise.
• Skills for tomorrow: The session underscored that green skills are not just technical but political. Speakers from unions and civil society called for training pathways that combine climate literacy, rights-based education, and vocational upskilling, particularly for women, migrant, and young workers. Initiatives like Ukraine’s PROFBUD hubs and IG BAU/PECO’s climate education show that green training must include organising, inclusion, and collective bargaining. Building truly “green and decent” jobs means shaping the content of training systems, not just expanding them.
• Supply chains: Discussions exposed risks of outsourcing and informality, but also the potential of ILO standards and Green Building Council frameworks to embed labour rights in decarbonisation across the construction value chain and certification standards.

The closing Housing for All roundtable, joined by actors from the civil society, housing, and climate movement, issued a collective call for Green Homes for All, uniting demands for:

1. Housing as a right and climate priority
2. Climate finance tied to labour standards & social protections
3. Unionised jobs through green retrofits
4. Public housing investment for climate & social justice
5. Workers’ and communities’ voices at the centre

BWI General Secretary Ambet Yuson closed the conference: “A just transition means safe, unionised jobs in the built environment and affordable homes for workers and communities. Without both, there is no climate justice.”

The conference concluded with keynote remarks from Verena Hubertz, German Federal Minister for Housing, Urban Development and Building, who reinforced that housing and decent work are inseparable pillars of the green transition.

As Europe heads toward COP30 in Belém, the message is clear: decent work, protections for frontline workers, and housing justice must be treated as twin foundations of climate justice.

(Verena Hubertz, German Federal Minister for Housing, Urban Development and Building)