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We are the Climate Justice Learning Group of Work on Climate. The Work on Climate community is an online community dedicated to removing barriers to people working on climate, whether through job-seeking, entrepreneurship, volunteer work, or organizing with others..
The learning group consists of a mix of technologists, designers, artists, activists, and business people who are interested in climate justice. We were collectively relatively new to Climate Justice before writing this guide; we are not scholars or frontline experts.
The members of the learning group started this document with a brainstorm. The ideas were then categorized into overarching topics and then researched. Climate justice is nuanced and there’s a lot we are missing! As a living document, we hope this guide can grow over time to support further learning.
This resource is not here to replace or repeat existing work on climate justice, but rather to serve as a starting point that maps out and amplifies a sample of existing work through short answers and thoughtfully selected resources.
The document is for someone new to climate justice concepts and has a willingness to explore its complexities. We assume a basic familiarity with the climate crisis and a willingness to address it—we accept as facts that the Earth is warming, that time is running out, and that we must do something. We accept the existence of systemic racism and other systemic oppressions, while not assuming that readers are intimately acquainted with critical theory.
Each section has the definition of the concept, why it matters, power dynamics in action, and what to do. We hope that you leave with a basic understanding of climate justice and power dynamics.
Power drives many of the systemic barriers causing climate change. Looking at climate change through a power lens lends itself to address more fundamental structures than just carbon impact or environmental footprint. To understand these dynamics, it's important to ask questions about who or what has control over resources, decisions, influence, land, cultures, and bodies; and why and how it came to be. Power itself is not bad, but the intention guiding it can lead to bad outcomes. Processes designed for entities with concentrated power to exploit, discard, or oppress others to gain more wealth and resources are the ones that have created most of our climate issues.
In this guide, we adapt the framework from a paper called Climate justice and the built environment to break down power dynamics of each topic—look for the “What are the power dynamics?” sections. It includes 3 angles -- distributive justice, procedural justice, and recognition justice. You can use this framework and its questions to analyze justice issues for any climate topic.
Framework for understanding justice issue
Learn about the importance of Climate Debt, Fair Shares, and Wealth.
“The greatest effort of the climate transition must ultimately be borne by the people who have the wealth, and this has to be true both within countries and between them.”