Date: 13 April 2026
Based on insights shared by Camilla Roman, Senior Technical Specialist at the International Labour Organization, during the GGGI-GGKP webinar on Embedding Just Transitions into Long-Term Climate Strategies.
From Long-Term Vision to Near-Term Action
Long-term climate strategies are often where countries set the direction of travel. They help define where economies need to go by mid-century, what structural transformations may be required, and how climate ambition can be aligned with broader development priorities.
But for the International Labour Organization, the question of just transition also requires looking at where long-term ambition begins to move closer to implementation. This is where Nationally Determined Contributions, or NDCs, become especially important.
While LT-LEDS provide the long-term vision, NDCs bring that vision nearer to the present. They are the climate plans through which countries define priorities, signal policy choices, and begin translating longer-term pathways into action. For just transition, this makes NDCs a critical entry point. They show whether fairness, decent work, social protection, social dialogue, and inclusion are beginning to move from principle into planning.
At the GGGI-GGKP webinar on Embedding Just Transitions into Long-Term Climate Strategies, Camilla Roman, Senior Technical Specialist at the International Labour Organization, brought this near-term perspective into the discussion. Her intervention highlighted how the ILO is tracking the way just transition is being reflected in the newest generation of NDCs — and what this reveals about the evolving relationship between climate ambition, labour markets, and social policy.
The timing of this analysis is important. A new generation of NDCs has now been submitted, giving countries and partners a clearer picture of how just transition is being reflected in national climate plans, and how this has changed since the previous round.
ILO’s Lens: Reading Climate Plans Through Work, Rights, and Inclusion
The ILO, together with the NDC Partnership and the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, has mapped how just transition appears in the latest generation of NDCs. The mapping, titled Mapping just transition in NDC 3.0: global trends across 123 countries and published in 2025, looks at 123 countries that had submitted their NDC 3.0 by 30 November 2025 and compares these with their previous submissions.
The purpose of this exercise is not only to count references. It is to build a baseline for understanding how just transition is evolving in climate policy, where progress is visible, and where more support may be needed. It also helps inform the ILO’s work with countries and contributes to wider international discussions, including under the UNFCCC and the Just Transition Work Programme. The analysis is grounded in the ILO’s 2015 Guidelines for a Just Transition, which were endorsed by the ILO’s 187 member States in 2023. This gives the mapping a clear labour and social policy lens, while also connecting it to the growing attention to just transition in COP decisions.
Through this lens, just transition is not treated as a general aspiration. It is examined through the practical policy areas that determine whether climate transitions can be fair in practice: employment, decent work, green jobs, social protection, skills development, social dialogue, tripartism, sustainable enterprise development, and inclusion.
Just Transition Is Becoming More Visible
One of the clearest shifts in the new generation of NDCs is that just transition is gaining ground. Explicit references to just transition have increased sharply compared with the previous round of NDCs. Among the same 123 countries, the share of NDCs explicitly mentioning just transition rose from around 50 percent to 79 percent. This increase is visible across regions, with Asia and the Pacific showing the strongest growth. The language is also appearing more frequently within NDC texts, suggesting that just transition is no longer a marginal reference. It is becoming a more regular part of how countries describe climate action.
Employment is one of the strongest examples of this shift. References to employment were already present in many previous NDCs, but they have grown further in the latest round, reaching almost 90 percent of submissions. Green jobs and decent work are also appearing more often, showing that countries are increasingly linking climate action with labour market change. For LT-LEDS, this is significant. Long-term strategies often describe the economic transformation required to reach low-emission and climate-resilient development. The new generation of NDCs suggests that countries are increasingly beginning to connect that transformation with the people, sectors, and labour markets that will be affected by it.
Fairness Is Expanding Beyond Jobs Alone
The new generation of NDCs also shows that the just transition agenda is becoming broader.
It is not only about employment losses or new green jobs. More NDCs are now referring to social inclusion, social equity, discrimination, justice, and intersectionality. This suggests that countries are beginning to frame just transition not only as a labour market issue, but also as a wider question of fairness in climate policy.
Gender is also becoming more visible in relation to labour markets. According to the mapping, 59 percent of NDC 3.0 submissions include references to gender in connection with employment and labour market issues. This matters because climate transitions are not gender-neutral. Access to new jobs, training, social protection, and decent work can differ significantly across groups. Without deliberate policy attention, the benefits of climate action may not be distributed equally, and the burdens of transition may fall more heavily on some workers, communities, or sectors than others.
In this sense, the new generation of NDCs suggests a wider understanding of just transition: one that connects climate ambition with who benefits, who may be affected, and who needs support to participate.
This is also directly relevant for LT-LEDS. If long-term strategies are to guide structural transformation, they need to be grounded not only in emissions pathways, but also in socioeconomic realities. They need to consider how transitions will affect workers, enterprises, households, regions, and communities over time.
The Conversation Is Moving from Recognition to Follow-Up
A key message from the ILO’s mapping is that the conversation is beginning to move beyond recognition. The important question is no longer only whether countries mention just transition. It is whether they are beginning to put in place the institutions, resources, and policies needed to implement it.
Here, the mapping points to encouraging progress. References to follow-up institutional arrangements — such as just transition strategies, frameworks, or institutional setups beyond the NDC itself — increased from 27 percent to 51 percent. This means that more than half of the latest submissions now refer to some form of follow-up structure related to just transition. There is also a rise in references to resources allocated for just transition. This is still not present in most NDCs, but the growth is significant. References to international cooperation have also increased, reinforcing the importance of partnerships, financing, and support in turning just transition commitments into practice.
This implementation focus is central to the link between NDCs and LT-LEDS. LT-LEDS can set out the long-term pathway, but institutions and resources are needed to make that pathway actionable. NDCs can help bring the just transition agenda into nearer-term planning cycles, where responsibilities, policies, partnerships, and financing needs can be more clearly identified.
Policies Are Becoming More Concrete
Another important shift is the growing attention to policy measures. The latest NDCs refer more often to sustainable enterprise development, skills development, social protection, social dialogue, tripartism, macroeconomic and growth policies, and industrial and sectoral policies. Skills development stands out particularly strongly, appearing in 81 percent of the NDCs reviewed. Sustainable enterprise development and social protection are now present in more than half of submissions. Social dialogue and tripartism have also more than doubled, showing greater recognition that workers’ and employers’ organizations need a role in shaping transition pathways.
This is where the NDC discussion becomes especially practical. Just transition is not only a social aspiration. It requires policy choices. It requires training systems, enterprise support, social protection, labour market measures, and economic incentives that are aligned not only with climate objectives, but also with social goals.
For LT-LEDS, this points to an important lesson. Long-term strategies need to be connected to the policy systems that can support implementation. This includes labour market institutions, education and training systems, social protection mechanisms, enterprise support, and platforms for social dialogue. Without these links, just transition risks remaining a principle in long-term documents. With them, it can become part of the machinery through which climate plans are implemented.
A Near-Term Entry Point for Just Transition
The picture emerging from the new generation of NDCs is one of clear progress, but also unfinished work. Just transition is appearing more often, and the language is becoming richer across employment, green jobs, decent work, gender, inclusion, institutional arrangements, resources, and policy measures. But visibility is only the beginning. The next step is to ensure that these references lead to implementation: institutions that can coordinate action, resources that can support affected workers and communities, social dialogue that brings employers and workers into decision-making, and policies that make low-carbon transitions fair in practice.
Seen alongside LT-LEDS, NDCs offer a complementary route for advancing just transition. LT-LEDS can frame the long-term direction of transformation, while NDCs can bring that agenda into nearer-term climate action. Together, they give countries an opportunity to move from ambition to implementation in ways that are not only low-carbon, but fair, inclusive, and grounded in decent work. The ILO’s mapping shows that this shift is already underway. The challenge now is to deepen it: to ensure that just transition is not only mentioned more often, but built into the institutions, policies, resources, and partnerships that will shape climate action in the years ahead.
