On the evolution and continuing development of the climate justice movement

The concept of climate justice has emerged over several decades as a research agenda, an ethical and legal framework and most uniquely as the basis for an engaged grassroots response to the unfolding global climate crisis. Climate justice highlights the disproportionate impacts of climate changes on the most vulnerable and marginalised human populations, as well as the limitations of conventional political responses to rising climate instability. As a distinct thread in the evolving global civil society responses to climate change, climate justice networks have brought together representatives of indigenous and other land-based people’s movements, environmental justice advocates who have confronted inequities in exposure to toxic pollution, and elements of the global justice/alter-globalisation movements that have long challenged international financial institutions and other elite networks. This constellation of social movement actors has articulated a distinct countercurrent to traditional climate diplomacy, challenged both technological and market-oriented “false solutions” to the climate crisis and organised mass-scale public expressions of opposition to the incomplete and largely inadequate policy measures developed under the auspices of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. This chapter will outline many of the distinct contributions climate justice activists have brought to the wider global movement for climate action, especially through their organising methods, overarching ethical framework, intersectional politics and egalitarian, community-centred visions of a carbon-free future. It will also address some of the persistent challenges to this perspective, especially in an era of increasingly visible global climate impacts, coupled with rising political uncertainties and declining restraints on corporate political influence in several key countries.