- Conference
- 2025 National Delegate Conference
- Date
- 1 January 2025
- Decision
- Carried
Conference welcomes UNISON’s proactive engagement on climate change and the recognition that trade unions, and UNISON particularly, have a key role to play in combating this global, national, and local threat.
Conference also welcomes the commitments made in Motion 63 at last year’s Conference acknowledging the impact on all members, service groups and equality strands and the commitment to supporting the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty (NFPT).
However, for UNISON to take this activity, and this important organising opportunity seriously, words and worthy statements of intent are not enough.
UNISON’s commitments can only be fully realised if adequately resourced and prioritised within the union.
Conference welcomes the UNISON led motions passed at the 2024 TUC Congress:
1) Declaring that the climate emergency will affect all jobs and all workers adversely and is a key trade union issue for us all;
2) Calling for heat strikes in the face of rising workplace temperatures;
3) Calling for a year of trade union climate action including engagement with community and climate justice groups.
Conference also recognises that:
a) UNISON members are particularly impacted due to:
i) Public services being expected to provide the necessary social infrastructure to address the devastating immediate and future impacts of climate change; and
ii) Because of the huge workplace and workforce transformations needed to meet the UK and devolved nation government’s commitment for all public services to get to Net Zero by 2050 or earlier;
iii) Workers are already at risk from extreme weather, flooding and high fossil fuel energy bills;
iv) These risks are increasing, with the 2024 floods in Spain highlighting how the UK is underprepared for climate disasters;
v) A rapid and just transition away from fossil fuels is needed globally to prevent catastrophic climate breakdown;
vi) UK national and global financial investment in climate change mitigation and adaptation measures, including the necessary public sector infrastructure, should be funded by the public purse and not thrown to the perverse profit-driven incentives of private companies.
vii) That repressive anti-protest legislation passed by previous governments has not been repealed by the current government, and that climate campaigners, along with anti-racists and Palestine protesters, have been particular targets, for example being arrested in a place of worship, refused bail or given long prison sentences for non-violent protests.
Conference believes it is imperative that the Labour government review its disproportionate reliance and investment in inappropriate new technology such as Carbon Capture (CC). While CC will likely be a necessary, short-term, option in a wider array of more enduring solutions, it is a project that is unproven at the envisaged scale of use with no clear evidence about long -term harms. The current proposal to invest disproportionately vast amounts of public money in CC at the cost of wider investment in proven, necessary, safer and cheaper technologies and infrastructure must be challenged.
Conference also notes with disappointment the announcements by the Labour government of airport expansion, in the name of economic growth. The airport industry is reliant on the fossil fuel industry, and so expansion is in direct conflict with UNISON policy of a rapid and just transition away from fossil fuels.
The right to peaceful protest is essential in a democratic society. Repressive measures against peaceful protesters have a disproportionate impact on those, including Black people, with reasons to fear harsher treatment by the police, courts and prison system, and if unchallenged will be used more widely against trade unionists. Elected officials to whom the police are accountable should make clear that the police should be facilitating rather than repressing peaceful and non-oppressive protest.
Conference resolves to support TUC UNISON year of trade union climate action as well as supporting and adequately resourcing, our own UNISON Year of Green Activism in 2026, with COP30 in Brazil (10-21 November 2025) as a key mobilising moment of unity.
Conference calls on the National Executive Council to:
A) Bring climate issues to the forefront of the union’s activity: including green bargaining in all activist training; establishing national and regional networks of green reps; identifying heat and extreme weather hazards in the workplace and working with extreme heat campaigns; establishing a National Executive Council committee to take these initiatives forward;
B) Ensure adequate internal structures and resource to support the new Environmental Officer (EnvO) role. Looking to how other branch officer roles are currently supported and specifically with reference to how the Health and Safety branch officer, and other similar branch officer role activity, is resourced and supported;
C) Support union branches in organising relevant outreach events, including in branches and in workplaces, and in joint local activities with other unions and with wider civil society groups including climate activists, healthcare campaigners, housing campaigners and anti-racist activists;
D) Work with others in the run up to and during the Brazil COP as a key mobilising moment for trade union climate action. Supporting global solidarity initiatives ahead of COP30, including: continued support of the campaign in support of a Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty; supporting the ‘polluter pays principle’ in funding essential climate finance for the Global South, such as Brazil’s proposal for a global two percent tax on billionaires;
E) Ensure that where our climate policy, and the commitments we have made by signing the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty (FFNPT), come into conflict with UK or devolved nation government actions that we speak out (for example: if there is a proposal to issue new fracking licences in the UK, and against airport expansion. We will continue to campaign to save the planet regardless of who is in government;
F) Campaign for the repeal of repressive legislation which restricts the right to peaceful and non-oppressive protest over climate and other issues. Ensure that material defending the right to protest and opposing repression is available on the UNISON website and circulated to activists and members;
G) Consider what support can be provided, in line with Rules, for members arrested, charged or incarcerated under repressive anti-protest legislation.