Issue: Environmental/Climate Justice

Environmental justice activists that work across a diverse set of issues rank climate justice among their highest priority issues. They overwhelmingly rely on base building, coalitions, and organizing strategies to do their work. In reflecting on the movement’s contemporary approaches, activists articulate the importance of shared frameworks such as climate justice to shift popular narratives and action on climate change. The climate justice frame reflects a critical, intersectional, and reconstructive conceptualization of the climate crisis that requires disrupting the status quo approaches to climate change. This study points to some of the challenges and opportunities ahead for realizing such a contentious and transformative climate justice vision led by EJ activists in a moment of expanding political opportunity and risk.