The Climate Justice Movement
Richard Widick (IICAT:6/8/2021)
NOTE: Active curation of this page has been indefinitely suspended, but we keep it available for its sensitizing role for anyone seeking to engage with climate justice movements around the world.
The global climate justice movement (hereafter simply the movement) is actually a movement of many movements—a continuously growing and changing distributed transnational network of individuals and groups acting, each in their own way, to achieve their vision of a scientifically sound and socially just response to global warming and climate change.
I begin with an annotated reading list and archive of sources on CLIMATE JUSTICE, arranged roughly chronologically according to certain content of the essays that map out the emergence of the concept of climate justice and the central meaning it has accumulated since first appearing in 1999.
I update this page periodically to reflect our growing and changing knowledge of the movement.
As I discover new elements and incorporate them into our analysis, I put what I see as the most important source at the top—the structure of the page thus suggests a specific use: first, read from the top down for a roughly chronological set of notes; second, move on to the broader set of essays in the climate movement studies section for insight into the wide ranging scholarship being aimed at the Movement; then scroll down and watch the video lectures to see what prominent activists and scholars are saying from within the movement and about the movement; then scroll down further and read our annotated series of links to Movement organizations that we see as particularly relevant and the best path in to getting connected.
This page is divided into four sections:
1) Annotated Climate Justice Movement HISTORY Reading List
2) CLIMATE MOVEMENTS READING LIST
3) CLIMATE JUSTICE VIDEO LECTURES & FILMS
4) CLIMATE JUSTICE GROUPS & LINKS
5) MOVEMENT RESOURCES, and links with notation including news-feeds and blogs that we find useful for staying informed. Scroll down to review the annotated essays, videos, organizational links and resources that we recommend.
See also our related page: Emergent Global Civil Society.
In time this page will reflect my best understanding of the Movement.
1. Annotated reading list on early Climate Justice Movement HISTORY
History of the term and the movement.
1999: Greenhouse Gangsters vs Climate Justice by CorpWatch (1999).
According to Matthias Dietz, Guardian Professional, Tuesday 29 July 2014, “This relatively unknown piece from 1999 had a huge impact on the climate movement. The report by the NGO CorpWatch is the origin of the term and concept “climate justice”, starting a public debate. It is impressive how similar the original definition is to its current use and that the concept, which added a new dimension to the understanding of climate change, stemmed from a single NGO.” [Matthias Dietz is a researcher at the Centre for Social Policy Research at the University of Bremen, Germany and edited the Routledge Handbook of the Climate Change Movement.]> Climate Knowledge and Power: Tales of Skeptic Tanks, Weather Gods, and Sagas for Climate (In)justice,” by Michael K. Dorsey, Capitalism Nature Socialism 18 (2) (June, 2007), 7 – 21.
On the history of climate justice, the movement and the concept, see especially pps. 13 – 20, in which Dorsey considers the role of two conferences that, looking back, are important for understanding the context of climate justice demands being made today—the “Just Climate” conference at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan, March 26, 2004; and seven months later, in Durban, South Africa, a meeting of The Durban Group for Climate Justice.
2002: Bali Principles of Climate Justice.
2004: Participants in the 2004 University of Michigan’s Just Climate conference published The Climate Justice Declaration.
In October 2004, the Durban Group for Climate Justice published The Durban Declaration on Carbon Trading.
2007. Climate Justice Now! (CJN!), Bali, 14 December 2007 “Founding Statement” [by: Carbon Trade Watch, Transnational Institute; Center for Environmental Concerns; Focus on the Global South; Freedom from Debt Coalition, Philippines; Friends of the Earth International; Gendercc – Women for Climate Justice, Global Forest Coalition; Global Justice Ecology Project; International Forum on Globalization; Kalikasan-Peoples Network for the Environment (Kalikasan-PNE); La Vía Campesina; members of the Durban Group for Climate Justice; Oilwatch; Pacific Indigenous Peoples Environment Coalition, Aotearoa/New Zealand; Sustainable Energy and Economy Network; The Indigenous Environmental Network; Third World Network; WALHI/ Friends of the Earth Indonesia; World Rainforest Movement.]
Climate Justice Now!
Peoples from social organizations and movements from across the globe brought the fight for social, ecological and gender justice into the negotiating rooms and onto the streets during the UN climate summit in Bali. Inside and outside the convention centre, activists demanded alternative policies and practices that protect livelihoods and the environment.
In dozens of side events, reports, impromptu protests and press conferences, the false solutions to climate change – such as carbon offsetting, carbon trading for forests, agrofuels, trade liberalization and privatization pushed by governments, financial institutions and multinational corporations – have been exposed.
Affected communities, Indigenous Peoples, women and peasant farmers called for real solutions to the climate crisis, solutions which have failed to capture the attention of political leaders. These genuine solutions include:
Reduced consumption.
Huge financial transfers from North to South based on historical responsibility and ecological debt for adaptation and mitigation costs paid for by redirecting military budgets, innovative taxes and debt cancellation.
Leaving fossil fuels in the ground and investing in appropriate energy-efficiency and safe, clean and community-led renewable energy.
Rights based resource conservation that enforces Indigenous land rights and promotes peoples’ sovereignty over energy, forests, land and water.
Sustainable family farming and peoples’ food sovereignty.
Inside the negotiations, the rich industrialized countries have put unjustifiable pressure on Southern governments to commit to emissions’ reductions.
At the same time, they have refused to live up to their own legal and moral obligations to radically cut emissions and support developing countries’ efforts to reduce emissions and adapt to climate impacts. Once again, the majority world is being forced to pay for the excesses of the minority.
Compared to the outcomes of the official negotiations, the major success of Bali is the momentum that has been built towards creating a diverse, global movement for climate justice. We will take our struggle forward not just in the talks, but on the ground and in the streets – Climate Justice Now!
2009: UN-NGLS, Climate Justice for Changing Planet (2009) (PDF).
2009: Seattle Activists Coming of Age in Copenhagen with be Very Disobedient, Guardian UK, November 12, 2009.
2009. Climate Justice Action (coalition formed ahead of Copenhagen, Tadzio Mueller, spokesman).
2010: Patrick Bond and Michael Dorsey (2012), “Anatomies of Environmental Knowledge and Resistance: Diverse Climate Justice Movements and Waning Eco-Neoliberalism,” Journal of Australian Political Economy 66, 286 – 316.
2010. The Dead End of Climate Justice, by Tim Simons and Tonak Ali, Counterpunch, January 8, 2010.
2010: World Peoples Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth, April 2010.
2012. The Politics of Climate Justice, by Patrick Bond.
Patrick Bond was Director of the Durban Center for Civil Society at KwaZulu-Natal University, Durban, South Africa, where he assembled this excellent archive of Climate Justice Manifestos.
2012: David Pellow. “Climate Disruption in the Global South,” White Paper, Joint Center for Political and Economic Study. [full citation: Pellow, David N. 2012. “Climate Disruption in the Global South: Key Issues, Frameworks, and Possibilities for Climate Justice.” White Paper, the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies. Washington, D.C. February. jointcenter.org]
2013: “Movements for Climate Justice,” by Brian Tokar, 2013, Handbook of the Climate Movement, M. Doetz, ed..
2013: Declaration on Climate Justice (2013), Mary Robinson Climate Justice Foundation. See also this previous pamphlet by Robinson: Expanding Global Cooperation on Climate Change; World Resources Institute & Mary Robinson Foundation, working Paper, “Climate Justice: Equity and Justice Informing a New Climate Agreement” (2013).
2013. “Articulating Climate Justice in Copenhagen,” by Paul Chatterton, David Featherstone, & Paul Routledge, Antipode Vol. 45 No. 3, 2013.
2. CLIMATE MOVEMENTS READING LIST
From time to time we will publish here links to particular articles that we discover to be useful in our own search for conceptual tools and information that may help in knowing and understanding the Movement and how it functions in relation to the UN climate talks, UN development policy, and various developments in national climate policy.
1) Basic context:
Patrick Bond and Michael Dorsey (2010): “Anatomies of Environmental Knowledge and Resistance: Diverse Climate Justice Movements and Waning Eco-Neoliberalism,” Journal of Australian Political Economy 66, pps. 286 – 316.
2) Case Studies in Climate Justice:
There is no better way to provide such tools than to cite case studies that use them to document concrete particular expressions of the general problem of climate change, global climate governance, and national climate policies:
Oliver Pye (2010) The biofuel connection – transnational activism and the palm
oil boom, The Journal of Peasant Studies, 37:4, 851-874.
Maiba’s case study of People’s Global Action provides excellent insight into the the formation of todays climate justice movement networks:
Hermann Maiba. “Grassroots Transnational Social Movement Activism: The Case of People’s Global Action,” Sociological Focus 38 (February 2005): 41 – 63 — See especially p. 49, section The Historical Context for the Emergence of Peoples’ Global Action, for an historical look at the emergence of transnational movement activism.
The NETORK FORM, and its technological conditions of possibility
The climate justice movement is a distributed network (form of power) of … what exactly? or rather whom?
Network politics in the transnational spaces of late-globalization (in other words, of today! but starting when exactly? I would say Seattle 1999, that being the year that the new technologies most clearly and firstly manifested their disruptive powers). Jeffrey Juris provides a nice study of turn of the century global justice movements in Barcelona—read it with the global climate justice movement in mind, and consider that it it already a decade later. So much more digital technology, and especially the rise of social media, all of which indicate that Juris’s theoretical coordinates are only getting more and more germane:
Jeffrey Juris (2007) “A New Way of Doing Politics? Global Justice Movements and the Cultural Logic of Networking,” RECHECHES Sociologiques et Anthropologiques 38:1, 127 -142.
RELEVANT BOOKS, RECENT & CLASSIC, IN SOCIAL MOVEMENT STUDIES
Negri and Hardt. Empire, Multitude, and Commonwealth (pdf)+ essential critical reading of the trilogy by Joel Wainwright (review of Commonwealth; . [Samir Amin pushes back against the concept of the multitude in the Monthly Review].
David Harvey on Antonio Negri & Michael Hardt’s on Commonwealth + reviews (1) …
Donatella Della Porta and Sidney Tarrow (eds) 2005 Transnational Protests and Global Activism .
3. CLIMATE JUSTICE MEDIA & FILM ARCHIVES
EJ/CJ Media Archive
EJ/CJ Film Archive
Richard Widick is Co-Founder, Member, and Webmaster for EJ/CJ, the Environmental Justice and Climate Justice Studies Research Hub at the University of California, Santa Barbara’s Orfalea Center for Global & International Studies.
Climate Action Network International
Friends of the Earth International
Glasgow Caledonian University Centre for Climate Justice
Health of Mother Earth / HOME Foundation
Mary Robinson Foundation Climate Justice
Pan-African Climate Justice Alliance
United Kingdom Youth Climate Coalition
EXTINCTION REBELLION (XR)
INSIDE THE United States
Asian-Pacific Environmental Network – APEN
California Progressive Alliance
Post-Carbon Institute / publisher of Resilience.org
System Change Not Climate Change
MOVEMENT RESOURCES
The Ecologist: Journal for the Post-Industrial Age: A leading environmental affairs platform.
Interpress News Service (IPS) – http://www.ipsnews.net/ – see also their Climate Change page – http://www.ipsnews.net/news/environment/climate-change/
Climate Central – http://www.climatecentral.org/ – “Our mission is to communicate the science and effects of climate change to the public and decision-makers, and inspire Americans to support action to stabilize the climate, prepare for impacts of climate change, or some combination of the two. Climate Central conducts scientific research on climate change and informs the public of key findings. Our public outreach is informed by our own scientific research and that of other leading climate scientists. Our scientists publish, and our journalists report on climate science, energy, impacts such as sea level rise, climate change attribution and related topics.
Climate Code Red – http://www.climatecodered.org/ – “The aim of the site is to talk about the new science research which reinforced the need the climate action beyond the failure of politics and business as usual, analyse the growing gap between science and politics, and provide a weekly summary of climate stories in the media.”
FOCUS ON SELECTED ORGANIZATIONS
The following links, missions statements, and notes are provided in full understanding that the movement(s) and the various groups that associate with it are open and changing entities that can never be fully capable of defining, listing, grasping, or otherwise adequately representing.
Nevertheless, in order to advance my work I periodically update this list and suggest that our readers look critically for themselves at the various contributions each is making, or not, to the global effort to build a global movement as well as local campaigns.
Friends of the Earth International (FOEI): Mission & Vision: “Our vision is of a peaceful and sustainable world based on societies living in harmony with nature./We envision a society of interdependent people living in dignity, wholeness and fulfilment in which equity and human and peoples’ rights are realized./This will be a society built upon peoples’ sovereignty and participation. It will be founded on social, economic, gender and environmental justice and be free from all forms of domination and exploitation, such as neoliberalism, corporate globalization, neo-colonialism and militarism./We believe that our children’s future will be better because of what we do.”/Previously: “We are the world’s largest grassroots environmental network, uniting 76 national member groups and some 5,000 local activist groups on every continent. With over 2 million members and supporters around the world, we campaign on today’s most urgent environmental and social issues. We challenge the current model of economic and corporate globalization, and promote solutions that will help to create environmentally sustainable and socially just societies.”
La Via Campesina – “La Via Campesina is the international movement which brings together millions of peasants, small and medium-size farmers, landless people, women farmers, indigenous people, migrants and agricultural workers from around the world. It defends small-scale sustainable agriculture as a way to promote social justice and dignity. It strongly opposes corporate driven agriculture and transnational companies that are destroying people and nature… La Via Campesina comprises about 150 local and national organizations in 70 countries from Africa, Asia, Europe and the Americas. Altogether, it represents about 200 million farmers. It is an autonomous, pluralist and multicultural movement, independent from any political, economic or other type of affiliation”
Indigenous Environmental Network – “Established in 1990 within the United States, IEN was formed by grassroots Indigenous peoples and individuals to address environmental and economic justice issues (EJ). IEN’s activities include building the capacity of Indigenous communities and tribal governments to develop mechanisms to protect our sacred sites, land, water, air, natural resources, health of both our people and all living things, and to build economically sustainable communities.IEN accomplishes this by maintaining an informational clearinghouse, organizing campaigns, direct actions and public awareness, building the capacity of community and tribes to address EJ issues, development of initiatives to impact policy, and building alliances among Indigenous communities, tribes, inter-tribal and Indigenous organizations, people-of-color/ethnic organizations, faith-based and women groups, youth, labor, environmental organizations and others. IEN convenes local, regional and national meetings on environmental and economic justice issues, and provides support, resources and referral to Indigenous communities and youth throughout primarily North America – and in recent years – globally.”
The Global Campaign to Demand Climate Justice! : Read and download the flier from Third World Network, and be sure to reach the bottom for the long list of signatories as of May 2012.
Third World Network (TWN): Inter alia, TWN works on the inside of the negotiations, reporting on meetings and seeking to ensure just representation of ‘third world’ nations and peoples: Follow the links and read the TWN “Updates” from Doha COP 18 as well as the post-COP 18 analyses.
350.org : 350.org escribes itself as “an international campaign dedicated to building a movement to unite the world around solutions to the climate crisis – the solutions that science and justice demand. Our mission is to inspire the world to rise to the challenge of the climate crisis – to create a new sense of urgency and of possibility for our planet.” Founded in 2007 by author/activist Bill McKibben, 350.org takes its name from climate scientist James Hansen, whose research has concluded that returning the Earth’s atmosphere to 350 parts per million (ppm) of CO2 is necessary to avoid passing a catastrophic “tipping point” beyond which the climate will not recover. On Saturday October 24, 2009, the organization’s international day of action saw over 5,000 separate climate justice events in 181 countries.
Climate Action Network : “a worldwide network of over 550 Non- Governmental Organizations (NGOs) working to promote government and individual action to limit human-induced climate change to ecologically sustainable levels.”
Climate Action Now International (CAN): Inter alia, CAN works on the inside in support of the international negotiations.
The Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature : Their “objective is to connect and encourage the universal recognition and effective implementation of the Rights of Nature through the creation of a world network of individuals and organizations that through active cooperation, collective action and legal tools, based on Rights of Nature as an idea whose time has come, can change the wrong direction towards which humanity is taking our Planet.”
Global Justice Ecology Project : “What differentiates Global Justice Ecology Project from most groups is our holistic approach to organizing. We believe that the compartmentalization of issues is enabling corporations and conservative forces to keep movements for change divided and powerless. GJEP’s mission is to explore and expose the intertwined root causes of social injustice, ecological destruction and economic domination with the aim of building bridges between social justice, environmental justice and ecological justice groups to strengthen their collective efforts. Within this framework, our programs focus on Indigenous Peoples’ rights, protection of native forests and climate justice. We use the issue of climate change to demonstrate these interconnections.”
The Pan African Climate Justice Alliance (PACJA) – – “ is a continental coalition of civil society Organizations in the African continent, brought together by common goal of promoting and advocating for climate-friendly and equity-based development. Currently drawing its membership from 300 Non-governmental organizations, Foundations, Trusts, Community-based organizations, faith-based networks, national coalitions and regional networks from 45 countries in Africa; PACJA aims to unify isolated civil society efforts on climate change advocacy and coordination in Africa, so as to ensure that pro-poor and people-centred response measures are put into consideration as governments in Africa seek to mainstream climate change into national development strategies. In the pursuit of its mandate, PACJA collaborates and encourages strategic alliances with international partners, national governments, regional governmental bodies as well as individuals sharing its aspirations, to ensure that the African voice is amplified in international climate change dialogue processes. The Alliance works with like-minded partners from the North and the South, so as to ensure that the resultant framework agreed by the community of nations after the conclusion of the ongoing, yet acrimonious international climate change dialogue process is not only equitable, but also a product of massive consultation, responsive to the realities of vulnerable communities.”