Climate Justice

Friends of the Earth Sydney collective takes action against root causes of climate change, and for creating just and sustainable communities and workplaces.

Download our Climate Justice Kit here

In 2009, we have been making a Climate Justice Kit, taking action against offsets and carbon trading, organising Climate Camp '09 (www.climatecamp.org.au), collaborating with Traditional Owners and coal-affected communities against expansion and to protect land, culture and water.

We want to explore solutions to the climate crisis that are community-based, democratically controlled, and assert the sovereignty of Indigenous peoples. We are seeking to be part of creating a globally-linked, anti-capitalist, climate justice movement.

Climate Justice Resources

If you're interested in reading more about these ideas, check out some of the links on the left, great documents below or some links: http://delicious.com/ClimateJusticeSydney

On this site, we've got information on:

For climate justice now!

Introduction to our Climate Justice Kit

Everywhere from the boardrooms of coal lobby groups to forest blockades, it is recognised that climate change is about people.  Only a lunatic fringe of political, business and scientific players now deny that climate change is happening, and that it is caused by human activity.  In fact, many have adopted the rhetoric of the need for ‘radical and urgent action,’ regardless of how ineffective or troubling their policy frameworks are.  What is not always recognised is that climate change is not just about people, as such – it is about power and inequality.

Environmental movements have recognised before that struggles to make a healthy environment are inseparable from the struggle of communities to live healthy lives with dignity.  In the U.S. in the latter part of the century, movements began to talk about toxic factories, incinerators and waste dumps being built near locations where mostly people of colour and people on low incomes lived and worked.  Activists and scientists pointed to rates of asthma and cancer.  Many spoke of ‘environmental racism’, where communities of colour, with limited power in the U.S. political system, became the country’s toxic dumping ground.

At the other end of the chain of production, the damage done by resource extraction companies has been environmental and social in every part of the globe.  Campaigns against companies like Shell and BHP have been supported by a sense that environments should be protected, but also that communities have rights to manage their land and live without having their drinking water and crop lands irretrievably contaminated.  Communities everywhere from the Niger delta to Ecuador are on the front lines of the process that fuels climate change – the process of digging fossil fuels out of the ground in order to burn them for energy.  In Australia, resistance to uranium mining has been enmeshed with the struggle for sovereignty for indigenous peoples.

It is becoming more widely acknowledged that people already marginalised by the global economic order will be more affected by climate change.  Climate change activists in many places are calling attention to the threat that rising sea levels pose for low-lying pacific islands, and delta zones in Bangladesh.

Calls for policies to address climate change, however, do not always have justice at their heart.  While many environmentalists and organisations will engage in a debate about whether emissions trading will actually reduce emissions, they will not always extend that debate to the impacts that emissions trading will have on people – whether it be people on low incomes in European cities, who will bear the cost of higher food prices, or people who will be forced off their land to make way for corporate plantations.  While many environmentalists and organisations talk about the need to transition our economic system away from fossil fuels, they will not always engage with what will happen to the workers in the industries currently linked to these practices. When ‘green jobs’ are raised, the discussion does not always extend to whether these will be good jobs, and to what extent workers and unions will drive the massive industrial shifts that the climate movement is pushing for.

Working for climate justice can mean many things – putting communities at the centre of how we talk about the climate, how we campaign for solutions to climate change, and the solutions that we campaign for.

This kit is designed to provide some resources for people to think through some of these issues in more detail.  It’s also got some ideas for actions that groups can work on together.  We’re not claiming to have all the answers – but we do think these issues are absolutely crucial to the work that the climate movement does and will continue to do for many years to come.