Glossary

The project ‘Resist the Global Climate Divide’ unites these perspective, bringing together young activists from around the world to create change in their local communities while connecting their actions to a global struggle. The following toolkit contains projects and activities authored and inspired by their projects with groups and organisations across four continents from the last year.

We hope it will energize you and give you tools to work towards this same aim in your own ways.

Our answer to the global climate divide is international solidarity!

Profit-motive: A central law of capitalism. Capital (money invested to make more money) relies on profit, which relies on companies expanding and growing. The profit motive does not relate to human wellbeing.

Capitalism: A system based on private ownership of the means of production by a small class of owners and wage-labour for everyone else. It is a system driven by profit, which means goods produced are commodities, that is to say they are produced in the first instance to be sold and only to be used after this. Capitalism is the economic system currently dominant worldwide.

Climate crisis: The ongoing crisis of global heating, pollution and human produced negative change to ecosystems worldwide.

Climate justice: A view on fighting climate change that sees the necessity of it being a worldwide struggle, one that particularly recognizes the larger impact of the climate crisis on countries of the global south

Climate refugees: Groups of people made homeless or forced from their homes due to disasters caused by climate change or conflicts that have resource shortages at their root.

Class: A division of people based on the ownership of the means of production, income and power under capitalism. Colonialism – The practice of exploitation, plunder and genocide carried out by European countries in Africa, Asia, America and Oceania. A historic foundation of racism and perpetuated through neo-colonial global relations of power and resource distribution

Decolonization: A perspective combatting the global order resulting from colonialism. This means not just an end to the exploitation of the global south by the north, but also support for southern and BIPOC struggles and knowledge, as alternatives to dominant Western practices.

Fridays for Future: A global movement of striking school children founded in 2018.

Gender: The ways we are taught to be ‘boys’ or ‘girls’ within society.

Global North: Those countries primarily in the north which dominate economic and political global relations to the detriment of those countries in the global south.

Global South: See global north

Greenwashing: The practice of companies implementing ‘green’ policies such as carbon offsetting to appear ‘woke’ and avoid further criticism.

Intersectionality: The combination of different oppression in a systemic sense. This is not so much an addition of different identities (for example Black, woman, disabled), as the reality that they are always all present at once, and must be conside 8

Racial justice: The challenge to racism and racist social structures that have been historically created and maintained. The equal treatment of all.

Social-ecological transformation: A way of thinking about climate activism that sees the necessity to change not only the emissions of our societies, but also generally how our societies work as a whole, as the two are intricately connected. This perspective sees climate change as an outcome of the capitalist profit-motive, and therefore proposes to alter its laws to protect the environment.