Issue: Adaptation/Resilience

This interactive webinar covered the process of how this collaboration between environmental justice and labor forces was facilitated, how they built a shared vision around resilience, a rundown of the report’s key findings, and a guided activity for how to apply the report’s insights to participants’ local communities and organizing work.

The concept of a “just transition” has permeated mainstream discourse, yet those who will likely be most impacted by the energy transition – frontline workers and their communities – have mostly been excluded from the conversation. This report, derived from over 100 listening sessions and interviews with workers and frontline community members, encourages policymakers to:

Go Big: Be guided by a just transition vision that is ambitious and comprehensive in order to address the scope of impacts for affected communities and industries. Job creation, labor standards, and workers’ rights must be included.
Go Wide: Impacts from economic transitions can be felt in a number of ways, from financial to social to psychological. Policymakers should engage with existing social infrastructure such as labor unions, frontline community groups, and Indigenous nations to make sure support is readily available.
Go Far: While the climate crisis is urgent, just transition plans must not be fixated on the short-term. Instead, policymakers should include long-term commitments to workers and their communities as part of their vision and take into account differences in generational needs between older, established workers and those just entering the workforce.

In addition, the report addresses how labor and advocacy organizations need to develop authentic, trusting relationships with each other to build political and policy alignment around just transition goals. One way to start is to establish and expand internal committees and capacities to understand each other’s issues and perspectives.

Investing in community-based groups and networks is necessary to build resilience for good emergency response. This report studied different community responses to COVID-19 to help us imagine better responses to climate disaster impacts. During the COVID-19 pandemic, established community organizations, newly formed grassroots efforts, government, and funders all came together in various configurations, based on preexisting relationships and networks. Racism and other systems of oppression were the primary drivers behind COVID inequities. The people interviewed for this report agreed that our cities and our state governments were unprepared for COVID and that we are similarly unprepared for climate change emergencies. What is specifically needed to be better prepared for responses to climate crisis emergencies is investment in the capacity of the organizations themselves, including people (most importantly), back-of-house infrastructure, and technology. Building resilience must be people focused, intersectional, institutional, and rooted in anti-racist/anti-oppressive ideology and practice.

California and the US are increasingly beset by climate-fueled disasters like wildfires, extreme heat, and power blackouts. These events put additional stress on frayed hard and social infrastructure systems, and disproportionately impact working-class communities of color. To adapt to these changes, society must update our notion of disaster response to increase resilience in these systems before disasters strike. This report offers two models for this response: 1) building and normalizing resilience hubs where community members gather and organize both in good times and bad, and 2) increasing in-home resilience by recognizing homecare workers as effective agents for assisting vulnerable populations and bridging authorities and the frontlines. The report goes on to recommend specific ways to set up resilience hubs, train care workers, and develop forward-thinking emergency response plans to avert human disasters after natural disasters.

Dystopian plots focusing on a catastrophic future caused by climate change often immobilize rather than spur action. But decades of evidence and experience from health communication shows that techniques of entertainment-education are effective at changing behaviors. But these are rarely used for climate change (a notable [and hilarious] exception).