Trade unions representing workers around the world have become the latest group to throw their weight behind calls for an ambitious international climate treaty to be agreed at next year's UN-backed Paris Summit, with the launch of the new Unions4Climate campaign.

More than 50 unions officially signed up to support the campaign at the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) conference in Berlin last week, pledging to support calls for an ambitious new climate treaty to limit temperature increases to 2ºC and the delivery of an "industrial transformation" and "just transition" towards a green economy.

Sharan Burrow, general secretary of the ITUC, said there was a compelling need for trade unions to play a central role in campaigning for ambitious action to tackle climate change. "Threats to jobs and livelihoods include the threat of climate change," she said. "For unions it is simple. There are no jobs on a dead planet."

Significantly, the new campaign was backed by a number of national trade union groups, including the UK's Trades Union Congress, Spain's CCOO and CUT Peru.

ITUC said that its research had shown that low carbon economic strategies could deliver large numbers of well-paid jobs, noting that 48 million new jobs could be created in just 12 countries, while Germany has already created up to 400,000 renewable energy jobs in two years.

However, Burrow added that unions needed to take steps to ensure a "just" transition to a low carbon economy that does not disproportionately harm some countries and sections of society.

"We watched governments fail the planet and their people in Copenhagen and the same corporate interests want to see failure in Paris," she said of the UN's long-running climate negotiations. "The mission of the trade union movement to ensure jobs, rights and social equality requires that we embrace the cause of a just transition towards sustainable development - a transition that must start now."

The statement endorsed by the trade unions last week specifically calls for an "industrial transformation" capable to delivering steep cuts in greenhouse gas emissions.

"Science tells us we need to urgently stabilise carbon emissions at 44 GigaTonnes," it states. "Business as usual gets us to 59 GigaTonnes by 2020. It doesn't add up. All our economic sectors must change. We demand to be part of the industrial transformation with universal access to breakthrough technologies that will make our industries and our jobs sustainable for workers everywhere."

It added that the focus of the latest round of UN negotiations had to be on mobilising investment in clean technologies. "We have played our role in UN negotiations and fought and won commitments to 'Just Transition'," it reads. "Now we want to see the transition happen on the ground, including through investment in new green jobs, skills, income protection and other necessary measures implemented everywhere, with funding for the poorest and most vulnerable of nations."