by the Americas regional team, Business & Human Rights Resource Centre

As the global community turns its attention toward COP30 in Belém, Brazil, Latin America has a historic opportunity to place communities at the heart of climate action and demand a truly just and sustainable future.

Today, Latin America stands at the core of the global energy transition. It holds vast reserves of lithium, copper, silver and other transition minerals essential for batteries, solar and wind technologies, hydroelectric projects and grid infrastructure. The extraction of these resources continues to be associated with land rights violations, environmental degradation, displacement and violence against defenders. Globally, more than 50% of global reserves of minerals essential for the transition are found on Indigenous Peoples' territories.

But the region’s history is deeply marked by human rights abuses linked to extractive industries, particularly mining and fossil fuel extraction, which have long benefited from asymmetric power dynamics between the private sector and communities.

The Business & Human Rights Resource Centre’s Transition Minerals Tracker reported that South America continues to be the region with the highest number of allegations of human rights violations, accounting for 41% of the global total since 2010. The region is also home to some of the most effective community resistance to human rights abuses associated with transition mineral mining, including a large number of litigation efforts launched by communities and workers challenging rights abuses by irresponsible transition mineral mining projects.

In Chile, Bolivia, Mexico and Peru, various communities are resisting lithium mining, arguing their right to free, prior and informed consent (FPIC) is being disrespected, and they are not being given access to reliable information about the social and environmental impacts associated with mining. The same resistance is evident in the potential exploitation of copper in Colombia, Ecuador and Panama, as well as in Brazil, where traditional and Indigenous communities have opposed large-scale energy and mining projects, such as bauxite and rare earth extraction, due to a lack of consultation and threats to their territories. Cases of lack of reparations and access to justice in Mexico make clear these issues are systemic and widespread. The needs of communities and protection of common natural resources are all too frequently being disregarded in favour of pursuit of profits.

The need for an energy transition that is fair and centred on communities and workers grows more urgent each year. This is not merely a technical challenge – it demands a social, political and ethical transformation. A truly just transition requires reorienting mining and mineral supply chains around three core principles: shared prosperity, human rights and social protection, and fair negotiations.

Getting there requires ensuring that communities are not peripheral stakeholders but central decision-makers. It means not just inclusion, but confronting colonial legacies, racial exclusion, Indigenous dispossession, and rural neglect. A people-centred energy transition must consist of:

• Recognition and respect for Indigenous Peoples’ territorial rights;
• Support for Afro-descendant, quilombolas, and rural peasant communities, often disproportionately impacted by extractive sectors;
• Protections for human rights defenders fighting for land and climate justice;
• Recognition of the international human rights standards, such as the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, the Advisory Opinion on Climate Emergency and Human Rights by the Inter-American Court and the Escazú Agreement.

Latin American social movements must be central architects of, not witnesses to, transition strategies. One of the most hopeful signs of COP30 will be the broad participation of Indigenous Peoples and local communities. Nearly 3,000 Indigenous Peoples’ representatives are expected to attend – an unprecedented number in the history of the COPs.

For this recognition to be truly meaningful, the region must also take bold steps to enshrine mandatory due diligence, community participation and benefit-sharing into binding law and climate finance frameworks. Without this, the concept of a “just energy transition” risks becoming a new label for green colonialism, - new fuel, old power structures.

Across the continent, organisations and movements are calling for a just energy transition that transforms not only energy sources but also the distribution of power, wealth and decision-making. This vision includes:

• Equitable access to energy for all;
• Creation of decent and dignified jobs across new industries;
• Respect for territorial and collective rights;
• Recognition of local and ancestral knowledge as key to sustainability.

At COP30, governments and investors must resist embracing “fast-track” mining and renewable projects at the expense of adequate oversight and respect for rights. Instead, Latin American leadership should demand that all climate finance be conditional on human rights, transparency and community empowerment. COP30 represents a potential turning point: a moment when the global climate framework could finally realign with the principles of justice, human rights and equity.

For Latin America, a region of deep contrasts, inequalities, rich ecosystems, and strong community memory, the just transition must be built around communities, not extracted from them. If COP30 fails to enshrine this vision, the promise of transformation may once again become another chapter in a familiar story of dispossession. But if it succeeds, it could mark the beginning of a truly community-centred era where Latin America leads not through the exploitation of its land and people, but through the strength, wisdom and resilience of its communities.