“Climate change is happening now and to all of us. No country or community is immune,” said UN Secretary-General António Guterres.“And, as is always the case, the poor and vulnerable are the first to suffer and the worst hit.”
Of course, climate change affects everyone, but it disproportionately affects minority and low-income communities in the United States. These communities are often least able to prepare for, or recover from, heat waves, poor air quality, flooding, and other impacts, according to former EPA administrator Michael S. Regan. Race is —even more than class -- the number one indicator for the location of toxic facilities in this country hit by climate change. In order to create long lasting change to support the environment for future generations, we need to accept environmental injustice in our country as a significant part of the problem.
You might want to watch an extremely effective video (released in 2017 by ProPublica) on this subject, detailing the systemic, deep-rooted history of climate injustice in the U.S.
According to Mary Robinson, former president of Ireland and United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, climate justice “insists on a shift from a discourse on greenhouse gases and melting ice caps into a civil rights movement with the people and communities most vulnerable to climate impacts at its heart.”
Climate justice also demands a reckoning with colonialism, as highlighted by a 2022 IPCC report demonstrating how colonialism contributed to the climate crisis and continues to perpetuate ongoing harms globally. As environmental activists around the world are regularly targeted and even murdered by government forces- one environmental defender was killed every other day between 2012 to 2022 - climate justice needs to fight green colonialism and stand up against the silencing of dissent. The climate justice movement will need to center disability justice too.
Climate justice is about multitasking, as author and organizer Naomi Klein puts it: “if you can connect the issues and show how climate action can create better jobs and redress gaping inequalities, and lower stress levels, then you start getting people’s attention and you build a broader constituency that is invested in getting climate policies passed.”
Recent theorizing on climate justice has analyzed the rise of “bunkered nations” focused on expelling and disappearing unwanted people with heavily policed borders while hoarding resources in a sort of “super-sized prepping,” with fortress states both preparing for the end of the world and accelerating its demise.
As American philosopher Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò writes, “The possibility of keeping justice alive in our time hinges on our response to the reality of a warming planet.”
On the first day of COP30, the UN climate conference held in November 2025 in Belém, Brazil, a group of UN experts released a joint statement calling for full compliance with an International Court of Justice ruling delivered in July. In a massive win for climate justice, the landmark decision from the world’s highest court had called climate change an “urgent and existential threat,” and proclaimed that all states are bound under international law to tackle this threat.
Ultimately, though, the outcome of COP30 was largely disappointing: more ambiguous language, extended timelines, and voluntary instead of mandatory agreements watered down any goals delivered in the final roadmap. Perhaps this is not surprising when one in every 25 participants at COP30 was a fossil fuel lobbyist. The international environmental groups Demand Climate Justice and Climate Action Network denounced the outcome of COP30, claiming the roadmap document is just another tool to stall demands for reparations and climate justice. Even while talks took place in the gateway to the Amazon, halting deforestation was not mentioned in the final agreement. Neither were fossil fuels.
One high point was the vibrant presence of Indigenous resistance, with thousands marching in an Indigenous-led climate protest, the first major protest at a COP in four years. While Brazil advertised the talks as having the largest Indigenous participation at any COP, protestors rallied against the disproportionate presence of fossil fuel lobbyists and pushed for climate justice with real commitments to Indigenous land rights and reparations.
CREDIT: AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL
