A Local Approach to the Just Transition
Our Chair, Leslie Johnston, is speaking at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in Davos this week. Ahead of the conference, she explains why a local approach to the just transition is so important — and so effective.
We are facing a global emergency. As Johan Rockström said in unveiling the Planetary Boundary Health Check in September, "The overall diagnostic is that the patient, Planet Earth, is in critical condition. Six of nine Planetary Boundaries are transgressed." Our Earth is in trouble.
Despite the global nature of these interconnected crises, any solution to tackle them needs to be deeply local. We cannot work toward a green, inclusive global economy without putting people – workers, families, communities – at its core. To do this well, we need solutions to be locally owned, contextually relevant and people-first.
To better understand this, the Laudes Foundation, along with the Wallace Global Fund and Ford Foundation, partnered with Climate Horizons in 2024 to map 632 local initiatives working to accelerate just transitions. There is simply no one-size-fits-all approach. Rather, as that project outlines, approaches need to be context-specific and culturally relevant.