The Climate Challenge | Our Focus: Climate Justice

Climate Justice
A Just Transition to a Clean Energy Economy

Winning on Climate Change for All

Meeting the challenge of climate change is not just an issue for people who care about the environment. It’s for everyone who cares about fairness.

Indigenous peoples around the Pacific Rim are on the frontlines in the fight against fossil fuel projects that threaten to destroy their lands and cultural heritage.

Coal-fired power plants contaminate the water, food and lungs of nearby communities that lack the financial resources and political power to fight their placement.

We support people to make a just transition to a clean energy economy that champions local solutions for healthy, prosperous communities.

I have no doubt that the right to a climate system capable of sustaining human life is fundamental to a free and ordered society.
U.S. District Judge Ann Aiken in a landmark climate change case verdict brought by 21 youth

Poor and low-income people often lack financial resources to buy insurance cover that would help them bounce back from environmental disasters. And they often receive less disaster relief and recovery assistance.
Climate change is a contributor to some of the world’s biggest crises, including migration, food insecurity and violent conflict.
People in countries least responsible for greenhouse gas emissions often feel the effects of climate change most, especially when they depend on earth's bounty for their livelihoods.
Indigenous farmers, youth and nations from the global south are turning to the courts. Their lawsuits fundamentally seek to hold global north governments and businesses accountable for their historically higher emissions and their failure to act even though they have known for decades that carbon pollution causes climate change.

Social Justice
Crises
Livelihoods
Litigation

Microgrids using renewable energy improve energy access. They power remote villages in Alaska where no roads or transmission lines go. (Photo: James Brooks/Creative Commons)

Climate change fuels record breaking storms, floods, drought, and heat waves that threaten harvests. (Photo: Bob Nichols, USDA)

Clean Energy Can Benefit Everyone

The era of fossil fuel energy burdened the public with enormous external costs: workers killed in unsafe conditions, cancer, respiratory disease, toxic water and air pollution, mercury in the food chain, loss of food security, polluted rivers, destruction of wildlife habitat.

Clean energy, with drastically reduced external costs, will usher in an era that is fundamentally more just.

But the benefits of the new clean energy economy must be distributed widely to make sure it does not strengthen existing social and economic inequalities.

We support policies that drive job creation, sustainable investment, and, when needed, relocation and retraining investment.

And we call on international development banks to stop funding fossil fuel projects and turn their attention fully to supporting the transition to clean energy.

Climate change has a profound impact on indigenous peoples in the Arctic whose livelihoods are inextricably tied to the bounty of the sea.
As of 2016, more than 8.1 million people worldwide are employed by the renewable energy industry—and it's growing faster than any other energy sector.
Worldwide, approximately 100 million people live within three feet of sea level. Sea level rise associated with climate change could displace tens of millions of people in low-lying areas – especially in countries in the Global South.