CSO_Hero.jpg

Just Transition Strategy

  2. The Plan
  3. CSO Current Initiatives
  4. Just Transition Strategy

A just transition is generally defined as a proactive and holistic approach to achieving an equitable, sustainable, and climate-resilient future—one that centers the needs of impacted workers, communities, and land in the shift toward a clean energy economy.

In 2020, the Board of Supervisors directed the creation of a Just Transition Strategy focused on properly plugging and abandoning idle and orphaned oil wells in the unincorporated areas of the County. In 2021, the Board directed the expansion of that effort with consideration for workers affected by the proposed phase out of oil drilling and extraction activities in the County. In 2022, the Chief Sustainability Office (CSO), in collaboration with the City of Los Angeles and a cross-sector Just Transition Task Force, developed the Los Angeles Just Transition Strategy which identifies the following three goals:

  • Goal 1: Provide oil workers impacted by the phase-out of drilling and extraction of oil with the necessary support to transition their skills into jobs of comparable, family-sustaining compensation or retirement in ways that promote livelihoods and dignity.
  • Goal 2: Properly remediate and monitor impacts of closing oil well sites and integrate co-visioning and input from sovereign Native Nations on whose ancestral homelands Los Angeles is built—Tongva, Tataviam, Serrano, Kizh, and Chumash—and frontline communities in community visioning, remediation and land use redevelopment planning processes.
  • Goal 3: Leverage public and private funds to equitably and sustainably finance and coordinate the successful implementation of Strategy and Action recommendations, with ongoing accountability, transparency and advising from the Just Transition Task Force.

In 2025, the Just Transition Task Force is being reconvened to help identify implementation pathways, pilot projects, and partnerships to advance this work, and to identify any additional steps needed for a just transition towards a clean energy economy that prioritizes equity, economic opportunity and community resilience. Ongoing efforts are shaped by direction from the Board of Supervisors, which has reaffirmed the importance of just transition in recent motions and planning efforts. Listed below are related documents and websites: