Environmental Justice in 2025: How Ordinary People and Grassroots Action are Reshaping the Climate Fight
Nina Lakhani, The Guardian's environmental justice correspondent for six years, argues that despite persistent climate inequality, ordinary people and grassroots actions have reshaped the climate fight in 2025.
This year, the climate justice movement secured major victories, demonstrating that people's power is challenging political and corporate status quos.
At COP30 in Belém, the first Just Transition Mechanism was established to ensure a fair and inclusive shift to a green-energy economy, protecting workers, frontline communities, women, and Indigenous peoples.
Colombia and the Netherlands, supported by 22 other nations, committed to independently developing a fossil-fuel phaseout roadmap, with a conference planned for April 2026 in Santa Marta to share best practices and implement policy ideas outside the COP process.
This separate roadmap aims to create regional solutions and form a bloc with sanctioning power against continued fossil-fuel support, signaling important momentum beyond traditional COP negotiations.
The fossil-fuel non-proliferation treaty movement expanded significantly, now including 18 countries, 140 cities and subnational governments, the WHO, over 4,000 civil society groups, and more than 3,000 scientists; Colombia joined the treaty in 2023.
In July 2025, the International Court of Justice issued an advisory opinion stating that failure to transition away from fossil fuels violates international law, outlining duties to phase out fossil fuels and regulate polluting corporations.
In South Africa, a court ruling halted a major offshore gas and oil project and paused other proposals pending appeal, demonstrating how courts are becoming frontline arenas for climate justice.
Lakhani emphasizes that Indigenous knowledge and rights, alongside modern tools and grassroots strategies, should anchor global climate action.
She concludes that ordinary people must continue pressing through courts, protests, multilateral spaces, and ballots—highlighting Brazil's pursuit of a national fossil-fuel phaseout amid ongoing challenges with deforestation.
