What is Climate Injustice?
Those who are most affected, and have the fewest resources to adapt to climate change, are also the least responsible for the greenhouse gas emissions—both globally and within the United States. Those people are most often indigenous, black, brown, and low-income communities. That is climate injustice.
The goals of climate justice are to make sure no one is left behind in the climate crisis and to transition to a healthier and fairer future for all living beings. This means, as we move away from fossil fuels, that we also move toward a “just transition” that promotes a stable and sustainable economy, advances job and health equity, and is rooted in a thriving and healthy environment.
Oxfam summed it up this way in their explanatory article, Climate justice means holding accountable the countries, corporations, and people fueling our climate crisis and demanding they support those experiencing its harshest effects.
A Few Quotes
“To white people who care about maintaining a habitable planet, I need you to become actively anti-racist. I need you to understand that our racial inequality crisis is intertwined with our climate crisis. If we don’t work on both, we will succeed at neither.” – Ayana Elizabeth Johnson
“Do-nothing climate policy is racist policy, since the predominantly non-White global south is being victimized by climate change more than the Whiter global north, even as the Whiter global north is contributing more to its acceleration.” – Ibram X Kendi (How to be an Antiracist; page 21)
“The most important thing an individual can do, is be a little less of an individual and join together with others in movements large enough to make change.” – Bill McKibben
“My faith is an enormous motivator for me to engage as well, because climate change is not just an issue that affects the entire planet, it is one that disproportionately affects those who do not have the resources to cope with this change – those whom we are explicitly told as Christians to care for.” – Katharine Hayhoe
A More Detailed Explanation
As United Methodists, we are called to advocate and act for climate justice in partnership with communities disproportionately harmed by, but least responsible for, climate change and fossil fuel pollution. Action for climate justice is integrally connected with attention to human rights, the rights of Indigenous people, racial justice, generational justice, and the community of all creation.
Our churches and communities are situated in vastly different contexts of wealth, infrastructure, and resource access, so our approach to climate justice must be calibrated to these differences. Promoting climate justice must ensure decolonial approaches to climate action throughout the church.
As global temperatures rise, every place on earth is affected, but many of the poorest regions suffer the most severe effects. Most accumulated greenhouse gas emissions have come from industrialized nations, especially the United States, while poor nations with minimal historic emissions are experiencing the impacts of climate change first and worst, and may lack resources to respond to disasters caused by rising temperatures, rising seas, and extreme weather. In every country, children and people living in Indigenous, Black and Brown, or low-wealth communities are impacted most by both fossil fuel pollution and climate-related disasters.
Climate justice must include equitable climate financing. In 2024, poorer nations received only 15% of global clean energy spending. For example, Africa has 60 per cent of the world’s best solar resources; it receives only two percent of the world’s clean energy investments but is being flooded with fossil fuel investments. Clean energy investment must be equitable not only as a moral imperative to alleviate suffering but also to meet global climate goals.
In seeking climate justice, it matters who is at the table. Regions most vulnerable to the deadly impacts of climate change and to fossil fuel pollution, and regions with huge energy deficits, must have significant input into the United Methodist Church’s overall approach to this issue. This requires prioritizing the advice and participation of people from conferences outside the United States in decisions about fossil fuels, energy investments, climate justice, and climate change, and recognition that many people from the most vulnerable regions on earth are farther along in the work of climate justice than many of us in the United States.
Globally, climate justice must include 1) environmentally just principles, policies and practices in arenas and gatherings of national and international policymakers and nation states, 2) equitable climate financing, 3) a fair and rapid phaseout of fossil fuels, and 4) a just transition to conservation and renewable sources of energy.
Useful Resources
- University of California – Center for Climate Justice. Climate Justice recognizes the disproportionate impacts of climate change on low-income communities and communities of color around the world, the people and places least responsible for the problem. Solutions that address the root causes of climate change simultaneously address a broad range of social, racial, and environmental injustices. These solutions can be organized into Six Pillars of Climate Justice.
- Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Climate Portal has a set of Explainers including one on Climate Justice.
- United Nations University – Institute for Environment and Human Security enumerates 5 key dimensions of climate justice.
- Recognitional justice sees and respects everyone’s identity and needs
- Procedural justice ensures a fair process where everyone gets a say
- Distributive justice means fairly sharing burdens and benefits
- Restorative justice requires repairing past harm and compensating where possible
- Transformative climate justice calls for us to tackle root causes in the first place
- United Nations declaration. In 2022, the UN General Assembly declared that access to a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment is a universal human right. The declaration recognizes that the impact of climate change, the unsustainable management and use of natural resources, the pollution of air, land and water, the unsound management of chemicals and waste, and the resulting loss in biodiversity interfere with the effective enjoyment of all human rights.
- The United Nations Development Program (UNDP) supports countries to take bold action to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions, increase their resilience to climate impacts and support sustainable development priorities. The concept of just transition refers to integrating social justice and equity principles, processes and practices in climate action.
- Climate Justice Alliance is challenging the extractive economy that is harming people and ecosystems. The Just Transition framework is a vision-led, unifying and place-based set of principles, processes and practices that build economic and political power to shift from an extractive economy to a regenerative economy.
- National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) addresses environmental and climate justice as a civil rights issue. They work to dismantle misinformation and disinformation by reclaiming environmental and climate storytelling and public education through the voices, leadership, and lived experiences of Black communities dividing the challenge into four components:
- Black Communities and the legacy of entrenched pollution and climate injustice
- The True Cost of Creating Intentional Sacrifice Zones
- Emerging Threats Are A Reminder of Our Continued Fights
- The Need For Renewable Energy and a Just Transition
- NAACP also have a toolkit Power in the Storm that is designed to support NAACP members and partners in preparing for, living through, and recovering from disasters with dignity, using equity-based emergency management.
How to support Climate Justice
On this website, you will find ways to learn more and ways to advocate for change. In each monthly issue of our newsletter, we list some opportunities for advocacy. We also have pages listing some of the latest ideas for advocacy opportunities and our latest advocacy alerts plus a page of advocacy resources.