Watch our next newsletter to dive into this a bit more. The North-South divide when it comes to Just Transition is getting wider, this via the Financial Times:

The South African government has criticised the structure of an $8.5bn finance package provided by developed countries to help it shift from coal to clean energy, saying it relies too heavily on loans that will add to the country’s debt burden.

The $8.5bn initiative was originally unveiled at the UN COP26 climate summit in November 2021, with details of the grant and loan mix announced on Friday.

Just 4 per cent, or $330mn, of the international funding plan — known as South Africa’s Just Energy Transition Partnership — is in grants, officials said. The remainder is a mix of sovereign and multilateral loans and credit guarantees.

“The energy transition can really only be fully and properly executed if there is more grant funding and if there is more funding made available in the form of concessional [low-interest] loans,” said South African president Cyril Ramaphosa, unveiling the details.

“The key challenge for South Africa and our sister countries on the continent is access to new, at scale and predictable funding that does not further exacerbate our debt crises.”

The package above is for broad climate change financing, but it points to, certainly, the challenge workers will face in the global South to clinching a “high bar” Just Transition–without wealthier countries truly shouldering a larger burden (let’s make the well-known factual point that it is the richer countries that have contributed far more to the climate crisis than countries in the global South) too many countries in the global South will not have the fiscal heft to underwrite a robust transition for workers.