COP30 Policy Brief | Centering Peoples-Led Solutions: Our Common Agenda for a Decolonized Climate Future

They also build on ESCR-Net’s broader advocacy — from the Binding Treaty on Human Rights and business process to the global movement for debt justice — reaffirming that climate justice, economic justice, and human rights are inseparable. Advancing real solutions requires dismantling corporate impunity, confronting the interconnection between climate and debt, and establishing binding obligations for those most responsible for the crisis.

Members of the International Network for Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ESCR-Net) urge governments to reclaim real climate justice by decolonizing climate action and centering solutions led by Indigenous Peoples, women, gender-diverse people, workers, and other frontline communities. These peoples-led alternatives already exist—but they continue to be sidelined by corporate capture, greenwashing, and the same colonial systems that fuel the crisis.

The Global North owes an ecological debt to the South for centuries of extraction, exploitation, and atmospheric appropriation. COP30 must confront this legacy by ensuring grant-based climate  finance, debt cancellation, and binding rules that make those most responsible pay their fair share for the harm caused.

“Peoples-led solutions reclaim sovereignty and redistribute power away from corporations and toward the peoples.” –– ESCR-Net, COP30 Briefing Note: Centering Peoples-Led Solutions for a Decolonized Climate Future

• Corporate capture — the influence of corporations over public institutions and decision-making — has turned the UN climate talks into a marketplace for corporate projects,  like carbon offsets, debt swaps, geo-engineering schemes. At COP29 in Baku, for example, at least 1,773 fossil-fuel lobbyists from coal, oil and gas industries were granted access — a number that exceeded the entire delegations of nearly every country present. That’s the same forum in which global emissions still rose and frontline communities — especially across the Global South — are displaced by extractive and so-called “green” projects prioritising profit over peoples.
• Climate justice is inseparable from decolonization: the Global North’s wealth has been built on centuries of extraction, unpaid care, and ecological destruction — and those same systems still shape today’s climate negotiations, financial flows, and “green” agendas.
• COP30 is a test — will governments side with peoples‘ solutions or with polluters?

1.Advance Peoples-Led Solutions Beyond Profit and Commodification

From agroecology to food and energy sovereignty, communities are restoring ecosystems and care economies. COP30 must end carbon markets, reject “green” extractivism, and strengthen the legal recognition of the rights of Nature.

2. Center Feminist, Intersectional Analysis in our Common Struggles for Climate Justice

The climate crisis is gendered — women and gender-diverse people sustain life yet remain largely excluded from climate negotiations and finance. COP30 must guarantee safe participation, recognize care work, and make feminist leadership central to just transition.

3. Demand Access to Justice, Remedy, Reparations for Climate Destruction, and Protection of Defenders

Environmental defenders are being criminalized while corporations profit. COP30 must operationalize reparations for climate harm, align with international court rulings, and make protection of defenders a non-negotiable condition for hosting COPs.

4. Reclaim Rights-Based and Reparative Climate Finance

Climate finance must repair, not indebt. The Global North owes an ecological debt to the South — COP30 must deliver grant-based finance, cancel illegitimate debt, and set at least USD 1.3 trillion/year by 2030 for peoples-led solutions.

5. Expose the Cost of Militarism, Extractivism, and Systemic Inequalities 

Wars, occupations, and the military-industrial complex fuel both emissions and oppression. COP30 must demand transparency on military emissions and redirect military budgets toward care, repair, and community solutions.

It must also confront how energy systems are weaponized to sustain violence and occupation — from fossil fuel profits funding wars to the blockade and exploitation of energy resources in Palestine. ESCR-Net supports the Global Energy Embargo for Palestine (GEEP) campaign, calling to cut financial and political ties with corporations and states complicit in war crimes, genocides, and ecological destruction.

6. Confront Corporate Capture of Climate Negotiations

Fossil fuel lobbyists have no place in climate negotiations. COP30 must adopt a Conflict of Interest Policy, ban corporate sponsorships, and ensure climate policy is shaped by peoples — not polluters.