Written by Caroline Junker, Communications Intern

You may not have heard of “climate justice,” but chances are that you’ll support it when you know a bit more about it—that is, if you’re like most Americans surveyed in a recent study from Environmental Science & Policy.

To understand climate justice, let’s take a step back and remember the origins of the environmental justice movement. Environmental justice recognizes that everyone deserves equal access to the benefits of a safe, clean environment and a say in decisions about environmental policies that impact their communities. This notion might seem obvious, but before the 1970s, Americans didn’t have a clear vision of how deeply racism shaped access to basic environmental rights for many minority groups. Environmental justice emerged as a new faction of activism when researchers, spurred by the Warren County protests, uncovered a vicious pattern across American cities: garbage disposal sites and pollution-causing facilities are consistently located in low-income communities and communities of color, overburdening those communities with pollution. 

In this context, we can understand climate justice as a natural extension of environmental justice that focuses specifically on the impacts of climate change. Climate justice is founded on the idea of addressing climate inequality, the proven idea that the brunt of ill effects caused by climate change is often disproportionately borne by minority groups. This pattern can be seen across the globe, but also on a smaller scale within the U.S., as the researchers of “Americans’ support for climate justice” pointed out. 

A clear example is redlining, the collection of racist neighborhood grading policies that compelled mortgage lenders to refuse loans to Black Americans, making it effectively impossible for Black Americans to buy houses in desirable neighborhoods or accumulate wealth from home ownership. As a result of this, many more non-White populations currently live in areas that have historically lacked funding than White populations. Walking down the streets in these neighborhoods, you may notice few green spaces but many paved surfaces, factors that make warm summer air even hotter and increase hazardous exposure to heat. Residents of these disinvested neighborhoods are more likely to be exposed to air, water, and noise pollution, and statistically live by nearly twice the density of oil and gas wells compared to neighborhoods that were ranked highly in the redlining system. Essentially, entrenched systemic racism has resulted in many non-White populations living in underserved neighborhoods that are deprived of the infrastructure and support necessary to combat the effects of climate change. 

Another example that might be on your mind is the recent wildfires that devastated Los Angeles. While people from a wide variety of economic walks of life all suffered tragic losses and property damage, only a slim minority of the ultrawealthy had the deep pockets necessary to hire private firefighters. Residents of Altadena, a diverse community, might not have the financial ability to rebuild their houses. Many fear the encroachment of private equity firms, and research has shown that Black Americans are less likely than White Americans to receive relief funding from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). 

So how does climate justice intend to remedy these inequalities? The aim of climate justice is, as defined by the investigators of the study, three-pronged: to decrease the unequal negative impacts of climate change, to create solutions that include benefits for disproportionately harmed communities, and to give a voice to these communities when making decisions. If that sounds reasonable to you, then you’re on the same page as 53% of study participants, who decided they supported climate justice after reading a definition.

In this study, a sample of generally representative Americans were surveyed to learn about how their knowledge of climate justice correlated with other variables. Researchers used their responses to questions about race, climate change, politics, and culture to build a statistical picture of how these factors interact with support of climate justice.

Overall, only 19% of respondents opposed climate justice. Researchers found that people concerned about climate change in general were likely to support climate justice if they knew about it, but only 34% of Americans had heard of the term. In terms of race, people aware of racial injustice were also more likely to support climate justice, although they might not be willing to actually take political action about it. A better predictor for desire to take action was race: non-White groups are more likely to act on climate justice than White groups. To fuel further work, researchers suggested a focus on outreach and education, with the goal of incentivizing the public to pressure policymakers and institutions to enact large-scale change.

You might ask what’s been done so far to mitigate these disproportionate effects of climate change. Funding has been diverted to impacted communities through initiatives such as the Justice40 initiative under the Biden administration and the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). Clean Air Council has worked directly with residents of overburdened communities, such as Southern Delaware County, to understand the impacts of local polluters like refineries and incinerators and work to lessen those harms. The Council aims to protect communities’ rights by collecting and spreading information, collaborating on and supporting local initiatives, and developing legal strategies to safeguard public health.

The Council also supports work to bolster communities’ climate resilience. Climate resilience is all about planning for the future. It can look like investments in infrastructure, such as planting trees to reduce heat, or forward-thinking policies, like developing disaster recovery strategies that rely on community input. These frameworks can help lighten climate-induced inequalities, and can boost every kind of community in their long-term ability to cope with climate change.

It’s clear how communities harmed by climate change would tangibly benefit from the goals of climate justice, but researchers suggest that even people who may not support climate justice could stand to benefit from its accomplishments, such as pollution reduction and job generation. In this way, climate justice can end up uplifting a broad array of people. Climate inequality is an unfortunate reality– but climate justice can present solutions.