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.

Like most though, I'm not a single-issue person. As an immigrant and a Latina, I'm also passionate about immigrant rights, gender equity and racial justice. The good thing is that the climate justice movement isn't a single-issue movement. For the past two years, I've been a part of the Sunrise Movement and I’ve learned that the climate justice movement encompasses other social justice movements. The intersection of these movements isn't a new idea though; there’s Kimberlé Crenshaw, creator of the term “intersectionality”, and Hazel M. Johnson, the mother of environmental justice.

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.

One of these movements, or stitches, is immigrant rights. In this past administration, we've seen how immigrants of color have been demonized in the media and their pathways to citizenship have been made harder. As the 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 misogyny and gender inequity, which includes LGBTQ+ individuals and anyone who's been left out by the heteropatriarchy.

A third stitch is racial justice. The way society is constructed is racially biased, and so is the way that the climate crisis will affect different people. From the global aspect, the wealthier and typically white-majority countries, have contributed to the most environmental damage, and yet the less wealthy countries and those that consist of more people of color are going to be affected more. Peru contributes to .21% of the global greenhouse gas (GHG) 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 located within low-income neighborhoods, and anyone living within a mile of those sites is susceptible to flooding, most of which are Black and brown neighborhoods.

Truthfully, you can't talk about the climate crisis without talking about indigenous peoples, as they have been fighting for and protecting our earth for numerous generations. The Red Nation, which is a group of Native and non-Native leaders discussed how they noticed the invisibility of Native leaders and knowledge within social justice organizing and foresaw their targeted destruction.

Knowing that the climate crisis will affect people disproportionately, true climate justice must not only tackle the climate crisis, but the roots of other social justice movements.

So how do we get there? A starting point is the Green New Deal, which is a congressional resolution to mobilize every aspect of society to reach 100% clean and renewable energy, create living wage jobs, and a just transition for workers and frontline communities alike. The Green New Deal would provide economic security, clean air and water, affordable and healthy food, housing security, and much more, which makes it a win for everyone. It’s also a resolution so it opens the possibilities for further just climate legislation.

By piecing together these different pieces of just climate legislation, we get true climate justice, which is a win for every social justice movement. and creates justice for all.

Photo by Antoine Giret on Unsplash

Headshot Regina Loayza