Issue: Environmental/Climate Justice

This conversation highlights findings from two reports focused on how the climate advocacy community can support equitable climate resilience (the ability of communities to adapt and thrive in the face of impacts from climate change) in climate policies and programs, as advocates nationwide are pushed to think beyond a frame of “simply” climate mitigation: Making Equity Real in Climate Adaptation and Community Resilience Policies and Programs: A Guidebook and Mapping Resilience: A Blueprint for Thriving in the Face of Climate Disasters.

Just Transition is a vision-led, unifying, and place-based set of principles, processes and practices that build economic and political power to shift from an extractive economy to a regenerative economy. This means approaching production and consumption cycles holistically. The transition itself must be just and equitable, redressing past harms and creating new relationships of power for the future through reparations. If the process of transition is not just, the outcome will never be. Just Transition describes both where we are going and how we get there. 

Starting in 2014, the nation’s broadest climate coalition came together to take bold action on climate. In 2018, this coalition of labor unions, communities of color, environmental advocates, tribal nations, health professionals, faith communities, and businesses coalesced around Initiative 1631 to advance an equitable transition to clean energy and climate resilience. Momentum from Initiative 1631, a stronger legislative climate majority, and a base of mobilized partners and volunteers fed a stronger push for climate progress in the 2019 legislative session and, with momentum on their side, the coalition was able to pass multiple major climate policies with a greater focus on equity and good jobs provisions.
The first five years of building the Alliance (2014-2019), developing and running a ballot campaign, and working in multiple legislative sessions, transformed climate advocacy in Washington State in ways that provide an important example for others working to build power in the climate movement. This assessment was created with a value for an open dialogue with the coalition’s partners in the climate movement, and hope that sharing their story and lessons learned can be useful to others on similar journeys toward a healthy and equitable future.  

American voters support policies aimed at addressing climate change. Nearly three in four (71%) voters support requiring 100% of electricity to be renewable by 2050, and almost half would support the federal government helping to pay for the energy transition. Two-thirds of voters (67%) believe that government action on climate change would have positive economic effects (job creation, positioning in the international economy). Most voters also support policies that would implement pollution limits for industry and busines, create stricter fuel efficiency standards for trucks and cars, require private companies to pay a tax on their carbon pollution, and policies that would provide assistance to communities losing jobs in the oil and gas sector. There is also high support for updating infrastructure to withstand climate change and for the infrastructure updates to include pollution targets themselves. Finally, most American voters believe that climate change is affecting agriculture, extreme weather, public health, the US economy, and their family’s health.

From September 2018 to June 2019, the California Environmental Justice Alliance (CEJA) conducted message testing to develop valuable analysis about how to most effectively mobilize environmental justice communities to increase long-term, persistent engagement on climate issues and potentially inform their programmatic work.