Climate Justice: A Win for Us All Regina Loayza, Undergraduate, Enviroment and Natural Resources
I came to the US from Peru at a young age, and during my visit, I noticed that Lima had a red sky at night brought on mostly by vehicular and industrial emissions. While the US has done better in preventing air pollution, it also has its own challenges. It wasn't clear to me, though, how quickly I needed to act on the climate crisis until 2018, when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report came out stating that to keep the rise in global temperatures from reaching 1.5oC, we would have to cut carbon emissions by 45% by 2030.
climate crisis magnifies, those issues will only intensify. It's estimated that there could be up to a billion refugees by 2050 if no climate action is taken.
Another stitch, or movement, is gender equity. As the climate crisis unravels, the World Economic Forum found that women and children are 14 times more likely to die or be harmed when disasters strike, and among those displaced by climate change, 80% are women. While these statistics single out women, this reality really applies to all those who experience Like most though, I'm not a single-issue per- misogyny and gender inequity, which includes son. As an immigrant and a Latina, I'm also pas- LGBTQ+ individuals and anyone who's been sionate about immigrant rights, gender equity left out by the heteropatriarchy. and racial justice. The good thing is that the A third stitch is racial justice. The way society climate justice movement isn't a single-issue is constructed is racially biased, and so is the movement. For the past two years, I've been a way that the climate crisis will affect different part of the Sunrise Movement and I’ve learned people. From the global aspect, the wealthier that the climate justice movement encompass- and typically white-majority countries, have es other social justice movements. The inter- contributed to the most environmental damsection of these movements isn't a new idea age, and yet the less wealthy countries and though; there’s Kimberlé Crenshaw, creator of those that consist of more people of color are the term “intersectionality”, and Hazel M. John- going to be affected more. Peru contributes son, the mother of environmental justice. to .21% of the global greenhouse gas (GHG) To visualize this, imagine a needle and a thread, and how a needle stitches together different pieces of thread to create a product. In that same way, the climate justice movement is the needle that stitches together other social justice movements to create our product: justice for all.
emissions, and yet we can see that the impact there is much different than that of the US, which contributes to 13% of the global GHG emissions. Within the US, the predominantly white and wealthier neighborhoods are better equipped to handle the climate crisis. An estimated 70% of contaminated waste sites are One of these movements, or stitches, is located within low-income neighborhoods, and immigrant rights. In this past administration, anyone living within a mile of those sites is suswe've seen how immigrants of color have been ceptible to flooding, most of which are Black demonized in the media and their pathways and brown neighborhoods. to citizenship have been made harder. As the Truthfully, you can't talk about the climate 24
