Symposium on Climate (Im)Mobility and the African Court’s Climate Advisory Opinion: Putting Workers at the Center of Africa’s Climate Advisory Opinion

[Jacquline Wambui Wamai is a labour rights lawyer and an Advocate of the High Court of Kenya. She is currently the Regional Coordinator for Sub‑Saharan Africa at the International Lawyers Assisting Workers (ILAW) Network, where she leads legal and policy initiatives supporting workers’ organisations and lawyers across the region. The ILAW Network is a party to both submissions discussed in this post.]

As the African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights moves toward an advisory opinion on states’ human rights obligations in the climate crisis, and as the African Commission simultaneously drafts a general comment on the right to a satisfactory environment, the African Charter, properly read, already protects a right to a just transition, and both bodies should say so explicitly. Climate action cannot be evaluated only in ecological terms; it must be measured by whether it protects the tens of millions of African workers whose jobs, safety, and livelihoods are already being reshaped by a warming continent. 

A Continent Already Losing Work to Climate Change

Climate change is reshaping Africa’s workforce through at least three converging pressures: the displacement of jobs as carbon-intensive industries decline, the erosion of livelihoods in climate-sensitive sectors like agriculture, and the intensification of occupational safety and health risks for workers who remain employed. South Africa illustrates the scale of the first pressure alone: up to 200,000 workers were employed, as of 2019, across the country’s coal mines, power plants, and transport infrastructure, concentrated in a handful of Mpumalanga municipalities, with no sufficiently scaled alternative sector yet built to absorb them as decarbonization accelerates.The second pressure falls hardest on agriculture, which accounts for more than 65 percent of employment in many African countries. High-heat-stress projections suggest global agricultural labor productivity could fall 18 percent by the end of the century, with Africa among the regions hit hardest. The third pressure is measured in the ILO’s own findings: by 2030, heat stress alone is projected to cost the equivalent of 80 million full-time jobs worldwide, with agriculture bearing 60 percent of that loss and West Africa alone losing roughly nine million jobs. These losses concentrate precisely in the regions and sectors already defined by high informality and weak social protection, thus deepening inequality that existed long before the climate crisis arrived.

The Case for a Worker-Centered Right to a Satisfactory Environment

Article 24 of the Charter, should not be confined to ecological protection; it should be read, in light of the Charter’s own principle of indivisibility and interdependence, as encompassing the socioeconomic conditions that enable people to live and work in dignity. That reading links Article 24 directly to Article 15 (the right to work under equitable and satisfactory conditions) and Article 10 (freedom of association), and grounds a further conclusion, namely that the right to a satisfactory environment includes a right to a just transition, ensuring that shifts toward ecologically sustainable economies remain fair, inclusive, equitable, and protective of fundamental labor rights. Workers in the informal economy constitute a particularly vulnerable group under Article 24, facing sustained exposure to air pollution, extreme heat, unsafe water, and toxic substances, while simultaneously lacking the legal protections that might otherwise buffer them.

Articles 60 and 61 of the Charter authorize both the Commission and the Court to draw on international human rights and labor law, including the ILO’s Guidelines for a Just Transition Towards Environmentally Sustainable Economies and Societies, built upon by the resolution and conclusions on a just transition adopted by the International Labour Conference at its 111th Session in 2023 (ILO). Those Guidelines define a just transition as one requiring full respect for fundamental labor rights and genuine participation by workers’ organizations, whether in the formal or informal economy a standard, with no exceptions for workers displaced from declining fossil fuel sectors or those whose livelihoods are eroded by climate impacts directly. The amicus brief submitted also pointed the Court toward the broader wave of climate jurisprudence already available to it, including recent advisory opinions from the International Court of Justice and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, alongside the Charter’s own long-recognized state obligations at the intersection of environment and human rights.

What the Amicus Brief Asked the Court and Commission to Confirm

This argument translates into specific actionable requests for both bodies . The Court is asked to find that states must protect a right to a just transition built on ILO fundamental labor rights, together with adequate social protection and active labor market policies for workers affected by both climate impacts and decarbonization. The requests to the Commission are set out in full in the ILAW and WIEGO submission. In summary, the general comment should define the right to a satisfactory environment to include the workplace’s immediate micro-environment, with enforceable heat thresholds, mandated rest and hydration periods, and structural protection for outdoor workers; that states be required to finance adaptation for workers in climate-sensitive sectors as an immediate obligation, not a discretionary one, and that sovereign debt-servicing requirements cannot excuse a state’s failure to fund social protection floors; and that “social dialogue” be defined broadly enough to include informal economy worker associations, street vendor unions, and smallholder cooperatives, not only formal tripartite structures. Green supply chains for transition minerals should not be built on environmental degradation or labor exploitation, including through domestic processing requirements and corporate due-diligence liability reaching parent companies for violations committed by their African subsidiaries, and widespread livelihood destroying environmental destruction be recognized as a violation under Article 24 carrying liability for those responsible.  

Both bodies should recognize procedural rights as inseparable from substantive ones. Workers, trade unions, and informal economy worker organizations should have legal access to environmental impact assessments, heat-stress and hazard data, and closure or rehabilitation plans before decisions are finalized, and states should be required to protect environmental defenders, trade unionists, and informal worker organizers from the intimidation, blacklisting, and criminalization increasingly used to silence them. Finally, the Commission needs to recognize that environmental degradation, water scarcity in particular, disproportionately increases the unpaid care burden borne by women, locking them out of green-economy training and employment, and that gender-impact assessments should be mandatory for every national transition strategy. On remedies, there is a need to shift the burden of proof onto corporations to disprove the alleged environmental harm and require polluting enterprises to fund dedicated just transition funds to rehabilitate affected ecosystems and retrain displaced workers.

This is the argument the International Lawyers Assisting Workers (ILAW) Network has made twice in the past five months, in two submissions asking the African Court and the Commission’s Working Group to adopt it. On 30 March 2026, ILAW joined the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) and ITUC-Africa in an amicus brief to the African Court, filed in response to the Pan African Lawyers Union’s request for an advisory opinion on the obligations of states with respect to the climate change crisis. On 20 June 2026, ILAW joined Women in Informal Employment: Globalizing and Organizing (WIEGO) in a submission to the African Commission’s Working Group on Extractive Industries, Environment and Human Rights Violations in Africa, responding to its proposed general comment on Article 24 of the African Charter, the right to a satisfactory environment favourable to development (ILAW Network and WIEGO, Submission to the ACHPR Working Group on Extractive Industries, Environment and Human Rights Violations in Africa, 20 June 2026). That submission is not yet independently published; readers can follow the underlying process via the Commission’s public call for submissions on the right to a satisfactory environment. Together, these two submissions press the Court and the Working Group to adopt the argument set out above.

Why This Moment Matters

The African Court’s advisory opinion will be the fourth of its kind globally, following recent opinions from the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, and the International Court of Justice. Commentators have already noted that African realities received surprisingly little sustained attention in the ICJ’s opinion despite the continent’s disproportionate exposure to climate harm. The African Court and Commission now have a rare, simultaneous opportunity to correct that gap on the continent’s own terms, grounded in a Charter that already treats environment, work, and association as interdependent rights, not separate silos. As both institutions move toward decisions in the months ahead, ILAW’s position, filed twice and in two different fora, remains the same: a just transition is not a policy preference for African states to consider. It is what the right to a satisfactory environment, properly read, already requires.