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Climate change, an inherently social issue, can upset anyone's daily life in countless ways. But not all climate impacts are created equal, or distributed equally. From extreme weather to rising sea levels, the effects of climate change often have disproportionate effects on historically marginalized or underserved communities.

"Climate justice" is a term, and more than that a movement, that acknowledges climate change can have differing social, economic, public health, and other adverse impacts on underprivileged populations. Advocates for climate justice are striving to have these inequities addressed head-on through long-term mitigation and adaptation strategies.

The following are key factors to consider in thinking about climate justice:
1) Climate justice begins with recognizing key groups are differently affected by climate change.
From the United Nations and the IPCC to the NAACP, many organizations are connecting the dots between civil rights and climate change.

As a UN blog describes it: "The impacts of climate change will not be borne equally or fairly, between rich and poor, women and men, and older and younger generations."

"Climate change is happening now and to all of us. No country or community is immune," according to UN Secretary-General António Guterres. "And, as is always the case, the poor and vulnerable are the first to suffer and the worst hit."

Generally, many victims of climate change also have disproportionately low responsibility for causing the emissions responsible for climate change in the first place - particularly youth or people of any age living in developing countries that produce fewer emissions per capita than is the case in the major polluting countries.
2) Climate impacts can exacerbate inequitable social conditions.
Low-income communities, people of color, indigenous people, people with disabilities, older or very young people, women - all can be more susceptible to risks posed by climate impacts like raging storms and floods, increasing wildfire, severe heat, poor air quality, access to food and water, and disappearing shorelines.

Here are a few examples of how some communities may be more affected by these impacts than others - and may have fewer resources to handle those impacts, too:

Communities of color are often more at risk from air pollution, according to both the NAACP, the American Lung Association, and countless research papers.

Seniors, people with disabilities, and people with chronic illnesses may have a harder time living through periods of severe heat, or being able to quickly and safely evacuate from major storms or fire.

People with limited income may live in subsidized housing, which too often is located in a flood plain. Their housing options may also have inadequate insulation, mold problems, or air conditioning to effectively combat severe heat or cope with strong storms. Economically challenged people may also be hard-pressed to afford flood or fire insurance, rebuild homes, or pay for steep medical bills after catastrophe strikes.

Language barriers can make it difficult for immigrant communities to get early information about incoming storms or weather disasters or wildfires, or to communicate effectively with first responders in the midst of an evacuation order.

Some indigenous communities are already seeing their homes and livelihoods lost to rising sea levels or drought. For example, the Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw tribe has lost nearly all of its land and is relocating to higher ground.

Prolonged drought and flooding can affect food supply or distribution, making it harder for people to access affordable, healthy food.

Today's youth and future generations will experience more profound impacts of climate change as it worsens over time, from direct adverse health impacts to the financial implications of needing to shore-up infrastructure and other adaptation and mitigation needs.

3) Momentum is building for climate justice solutions.
Organizations like the Climate Justice Alliance are working to bring race, gender, and class considerations to the center of the climate action discussion. The NAACP is also advocating for efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and advance clean energy while promoting food justice, transportation equity, and civil rights in emergency planning. And the UN and IPCC each continue to place greater emphasis on these issues.

In a June 29, 2020, Washington Post column headlined " Climate Change is also a racial justice problem," reporter Sarah Kaplan wrote, "You can't build a just and equitable society on a planet that's been destabilized by human activities. Nor can you stop the world from warming without the experience and the expertise of those most affected by it."

One indicator of the growing momentum of climate justice as a social issue is Democratic presidential hopeful Joe Biden's campaign support for a "plan to secure environmental justice and equitable economic opportunity in a clean energy future.... Addressing environmental and climate justice is a core tenet."

In the end, there is no single way to define, let alone champion, climate justice. But in combination with other current social justice movements - perhaps epitomized and including, but not limited to, the Black Lives Matter movement - many experts see climate justice becoming an increasingly significant component of overall concerns raised by climate change.
Also see: How inequality grows in the aftermath of hurricanes

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What is 'climate justice'? " Yale Climate Connections

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It begins with the idea that the adverse impacts of a warming climate are not felt equitably among people.

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To build a winning coalition and beat the climate crisis, we need to understand and respond to how social inequities intersect with our movement. Only then will we be telling the real story of climate change - a crisis that doesn't affect everyone equally, a challenge that in many instances impacts those already enduring other hardships more acutely.

And telling that story is important because, to quote Maya Angelou, "You can't really know where you are going until you know where you have been."

What Is Environmental Racism?

When we talk about environmental racism, we're talking about the disproportionate burden of environmental hazards placed on people of color.

This oppression is often achieved systemically, through policies and practices that effectively place low-income and communities of color in close proximity to polluting facilities like power stations, plastics plants, and methane gas pipelines or to infrastructure like major highways.

Living close to pollution - often the same emissions driving the climate crisis - people of color are exposed to a variety of harmful pollutants at a higher rate than White and higher-wealth communities. This leads to far greater rates of serious health problems in communities of color, from cancer to lung conditions to heart attacks, as well as a higher prevalence and severity of asthma, lower birth weights, and greater incidence of high blood pressure.

Disentangling the disparate effects of poverty and race can be a challenge - but mounting evidence points in one direction: Race is often a more reliable indicator of proximity to pollution than income alone.

A 2018 study by Environmental Protection Agency scientists found that people of color on average faced a 28 percent higher health burden compared to the general population thanks to living in proximity to facilities emitting particulate pollution like soot. For Black Americans, the findings were especially troubling, with a 54 percent greater health burden reported.

>> Find more resources on climate and environmental justice here. <<

To be sure, community wealth often plays a central role in determining environmental policies, particularly regarding land use, zoning, construction permits, and regulation enforcement. The result is that low-income families of every color are exposed to more pollution than their more-affluent peers.

But even when wealth is taken into account, researchers still find a greater correlation between race and exposure to environmental hazards.

Moral Obligation To Act

The environmental justice movement challenges injustice and unequal treatment of people of color, working to raise awareness and end the inequities that mean Black Americans breathe 56 percent more pollution than they produce and Latinos breathe 63 percent more - while Whites breathe 17 percent less - for example.

In the US, the movement was born in the 1970s, when Black activists in Warren County, North Carolina organized to fight toxic dumping in their community. Right around the same time, in Houston, Texas, activists like Dr. Robert Bullard began researching and challenging racist policies that lead to 82 percent of the city's trash being dumped in Black communities - despite the fact that Black residents made up only 25 percent of the population.

Since then, the movement has continued to grow, fighting for safe water and justice in Flint, Michigan, clean air in the South Bronx's Asthma Alley, and an end to the urban oil fields in Los Angeles linked to dangerous birth outcomes. Tragically, the list goes on.

Fighting environmental racism means doing what is fair and morally right. As a movement, we have an obligation to act to dismantle the structures subjecting people of color disproportionately to environmental health hazards - again, many of them the very same pollutants driving the climate crisis.

Doing so starts with listening to the communities already living with fossil fuel pollution and the families hit first and worst by climate change. By understanding what the crisis means for them, we can work together for truly just and equitable solutions.

Because the only way to solve the climate crisis is by working together.

We are committed to showing up and standing with our partners, colleagues, employees, friends, nearly 30,000 Climate Reality Leaders, and all people who experience social injustice and racism of any kind.

It's clear: We are facing the real possibility that the climate crisis could steal the chance at a better tomorrow from people all over the world. But it doesn't have to be this way.

Learn more about becoming a trained Climate Reality Leader, and be the voice of climate justice in your community.

Watch the full webinar, Spotlight On: Environmental Racism, here

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Environmental Racism: What It is and How You Can Fight It

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To build a winning coalition and beat the climate crisis, we need to understand and respond to how social inequities intersect with our movement. Only then will we be telling the real story of climate change - a crisis that doesn't affect everyone equally, a challenge that in many instances impacts those already enduring other hardships more acutely.

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Around the world, communities of color and marginalized groups disproportionately feel the effects of pollution and other environmental impacts. Whether it's residents living along the polluted Cooum River in Chennai, India; Louisiana's petrochemical-dense Cancer Alley; Thailand's toxic hot spot Map Ta Phut Industrial Estate; or children living near a battery recycling factory in Naucalpan De Juárez, Mexico, environmental racism has long exposed poor people and people of color to dangerously high levels of lead, contaminated water and bad air. These communities suffer from high incidences of related ailments, such as cancer and asthma. Many have also witnessed the desecration of cultural landmarks.

A Natural Resources Defense Council report issued last year, Watered Down Justice, found that race is the factor that bears the strongest relationship to slow and ineffective enforcement of the federal drinking water law in communities across the United States. In Ecuador, the water pollution in Esmeraldas province, linked to palm oil plantations and mining, has caused skin rashes, genital infections and other serious illnesses. More than 90% of the Afro-Ecuadorian population living in Esmeraldas lack access to basic health care, protection or education, while 70% live below the poverty line. Government failure to enforce environmental controls has led to contamination of the water supplies, which local communities continue to use for drinking, bathing and washing their clothes, leading a UN Special Rapporteur to highlight the situation as an example of environmental racism. A 2015 report by the Inter American Commission on Human Rights also found pervasive problems associated with mining projects in territories where Indigenous Peoples and people of African descent live in the Americas, including contamination of soil and water and other negative health effects.

And yet, pollution and other environmental problems aren't always viewed as examples of racial inequity. Groups around the world tend to treat environmental injustice and racial injustice as separate issues, when the reality is that environmental injustices often spring from systemic racism.

Groups may ignore the pattern of indigenous communities and other minority groups marginalized by race, poverty, caste and religion living on the frontline of the pollution crisis. The reality is that because of this marginalization, mitigating the impacts of pollution is often not a priority for government action. Connecting the two concepts can help advocates strengthen their environmental injustice work by fighting the root causes of discrimination and ensuring that marginalized communities have a voice in decision making.

Environmental groups in the United States offer inspiring lessons for communities around the world on how fighting environmental injustices through the lens of racial inequity can curb pollution while improving equity.

Examples from the United States

The term "environmental racism" was coined in the United States in 1982 by African American civil rights leader Benjamin Chavis. A landmark 2007 study by academic Dr. Robert Bullard, the "father of environmental justice," found "race to be more important than socioeconomic status in predicting the location of the nation's commercial hazardous waste facilities." Bullard helped elevate the issue in the United States as an important target for advocacy.

Since then, community groups have successfully fought environmental problems by highlighting the underlying connection to systemic racism. For decades, environmental justice organizations across the United States have led the way, working alongside disenfranchised communities to combat environmental racism - both safeguarding low-income neighborhoods and people of color from toxic pollution, as well as dismantling the policies, laws and institutions that disproportionately expose these communities to greater environmental health risks. Even the current Black Lives Matter movement, while largely focused on ending police brutality, includes environmental justice in its list of legislative demands.

Here are a few examples, and the lessons they offer:

WE ACT for Environmental Justice: New York City's first environmental justice organization, WE ACT for Environmental Justice, successfully led efforts to mandate statewide lead testing of schools' drinking water, citing evidence that this type of pollution was more prevalent in communities of color. The group also forced upgrades at a noxious sewage treatment plant that brought respiratory illness to poor neighborhoods in West Harlem and cleaned up air pollution from diesel buses that mostly affect these communities. The priority for all their work is ensuring people of color and/or low-income residents participate meaningfully in the creation of sound and fair environmental health and protection policies and practices. Their approach offers lessons on the importance of working with local universities on community-based participatory research and advancing grassroots campaigns with communities of color to improve environmental policy on environmental health and justice.

WE ACT's efforts expanded awareness on the disproportionate impacts of pollution on communities of color and strengthened city, state and federal policies on environmental health and justice for all people. This includes the country's first Safe School Water Act, passed in 2016, which mandates testing and remediation for lead in all New York State schools. The organization also helped pass New York City's Environmental Justice Study Bill and Environmental Justice Policy Bill, which provide New Yorkers more information to identify and address environmental injustices.

Louisiana Bucket Bridge: The Louisiana Bucket Brigade has been leading the fight to end the negative effects of the petroleum industry on communities in Louisiana, with a focus on the expansion of the industry and its impact on historically African American communities. The group advocates for moving away from fossil fuels, collaborating with communities and amplifying their voices to help them achieve protection of their health and homes. The organization does this by working directly with "fence-line communities," a term used to describe people living right next to polluting facilities, on the discriminatory impacts oil and chemical pollution is causing to their homes, health and lives. They are also building tools that communities can use for pollution monitoring, such as mapping resident-reported pollution incidents; using low-cost air pollution sensors approved by the Environmental Protection Agency to document pollution; and collecting pollution monitoring data needed to support advocacy to address enforcement gaps. The Bucket Brigade has revolutionized the idea of communities monitoring toxic air emissions. They have promoted these monitoring techniques throughout refinery belts across the United States and influenced other organizations around the globe.

Utah Diné Bikéyah: Diné Bikéyah (pronounced di-NAY bi-KAY-uh) means "people's sacred lands" in the Navajo language. They are working with the five sovereign Tribes of the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition to protect the Bears Ears National Monument, an ancestral site, from mining and future development. This site has held cultural significance for generations of Diné, Hopi, Zuni, Pueblo and Ute peoples. Their strategy includes raising awareness and identifying solutions that address the stark discrimination over access to water for Diné (Navajo) people, and ensuring Native people's voter rights are protected and that they have appropriate representation in local government leadership. This strengthened voice in development decision-making helps overcome historical barriers to participation.

Taking it Global

The United States has hardly solved issues of systemic and environmental racism. Indeed, for every positive example of progress, there are countless more of continued injustices. But environmental justice groups have waged some hard-won battles - ones that could inspire communities around the world to tackle environmental issues as the racial injustices they often are.

These successes offer critical lessons to organizations working with minority groups around the world, including to start with the principle of Indigenous Peoples' and communities' self-determination; understand that fighting pollution often requires fighting long-term injustices that have had intergenerational impacts; and seeing pollution as preventable, but part of a struggle to address inequality and social injustice.

Learning from these approaches of environmental justice organizations across the United States, WRI's Strengthening the Right to Information for People and the Environment (STRIPE) project supports locally led, community-determined fights against pollution around the world. Working with local civil society organizations in Asia, Latin America and Africa, STRIPE builds poor and marginalized communities' capacity to leverage their rights to information and participation - internationally recognized human and environmental rights - to campaign for a clean, healthy and safe environment. This rights-based approach, pioneered by many environmental justice organizations, amplifies voices too often ignored, enabling local people to develop, advocate for and implement solutions that directly address their concerns. It also helps these same communities hold powerful government officials and polluters accountable. Developed in partnership with STRIPE's partners, WRI's Community-Led Action Toolkit, offers practical, tactical and strategic support to use these environmental rights as a vehicle for advocacy and justice.

It's time to acknowledge that environmental injustice including cases of environmental racism are a political choice that pervades environmental decision-making and threatens to further entrench systemic inequalities. Moving forward, governments, political leaders and other multilateral institutions must recognize that the fight for sustainable development and poverty eradication is a fight for environmental justice. Environmental and social justice funders must also start prioritizing finance for environmental justice, including local and community-led fights. Legal and policy solutions can no longer ignore the unfair, racist price being asked of the world's poor and minority communities.

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Pollution Is a Racial Justice Issue. Let's Fight it that Way.

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Around the world, communities of color and marginalized groups disproportionately feel the effects of pollution and other environmental impacts. And yet, groups around the world treat environmental injustice and racial injustice as separate issues, when environmental injustices often spring from systemic racism.

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People's Platform - Zero Hour

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Coal Blooded_ Putting Profits Before People _ NAACP.pdf

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This reading is about climate justice, and the  impacts of climate change on communities and advocates for equitable solutions Climate justice redefines climate change as both an ethical and political matter -Abigail

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The reading is talking about how people suffer with dirty air quality and how a lot of trash gets dumped in mainly black communities. The significance of this is that trash is being dumped on the black community which makes it a higher percentage of them to breathe in the polluted air. This shows how mainly black american groups are effected more by air pollution. miley

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climate justice is some sort of movement and the main issue is the climate going bad so people try to flip it around and try to help the environment - GABBY

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The group that was mainly being affected was Low-income communities, people of color, indigenous people, people with disabilities, older or very young people, women because of how they can be more susceptible to risks posed by climate impacts like raging storms and floods, increasing wildfire, severe heat, poor air quality, access to food and water, and disappearing shoreline. miley

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The reading is about how the lower class / poor population is suffering from climate change, and how there are the main line of people that are in fact getting the most damage from climate change so they claim that the people have to strategize how to efficiently handle poverty.

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Environmental racism is a significant global issue that affects communities of color This racism exposes these communities to higher levels of pollution, environmental hazards, and related health risks. The impact of environmental racism is far-reaching

-Abigail

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meow

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i think it means that most of the water pollution and trash go directly to low income neighborhoods and that makes people who live there sick and theres people who cant afford for healthcare - GABBY

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The issue is on how climate change is a social issue and would ruin a person's day because its outcome can be heavily unfair or distributed unevenly, The general public would start to connect the dots on specific places that would be affected by climate change

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This article explains that climate change unfairly harms marginalized communities the most, even though they contribute the least to the problem. This is why "climate justice" is important, as it aims to address these inequalities in climate action. _____Mahadi

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Environmental racism is when communities of color are unfairly burdened with pollution, leading to worse health outcomes. This is often due to systemic issues, and addressing it is a moral obligation and key to solving the climate crisis. ______ Mahadi