Climate Justice Concepts, Case Studies, and Frameworks

Comprehensive vocabulary flashcards defining core concepts, case studies, international frameworks, and scholarly theories in climate justice.

Modes of production

The ways a society organizes the production of goods and services, including its technology, labor systems, ownership of resources, and economic relationships. Capitalist modes of production prioritize profit and accumulation, often encouraging resource extraction and environmental exploitation.

Indigenous sovereignty

The inherent right of Indigenous peoples to govern themselves, maintain their political and cultural institutions, control their ancestral lands and resources, and make decisions about their futures without outside domination.

Feminist political ecology

An approach that examines how environmental issues and access to natural resources are shaped by gender, race, class, and power, emphasizing how environmental changes disproportionately affect women and marginalized groups and how their labor and knowledge are often overlooked.

La Vía Campesina

An international movement of peasants, small-scale farmers, agricultural workers, and Indigenous communities that advocates for food sovereignty, agrarian rights, environmental protection, and resistance to corporate control of agriculture.

Racial capitalism

An economic system in which capitalism relies on and reproduces racial hierarchies to generate profit, disproportionately exposing racialized communities to pollution, exploiting them for labor, and denying them access to environmental resources and protections.

Neoliberalism

An economic and political ideology emphasizing privatization, deregulation, free markets, reduced government intervention, and individual responsibility, often promoting market-based solutions in environmental policy rather than addressing underlying structures.

Peasant activism

Collective political action by small-scale farmers, rural workers, and agricultural communities to defend their land, livelihoods, food systems, and rights against exploitation, displacement, and corporate or government control.

Organized abandonment

The systematic withdrawal or denial of public resources, services, infrastructure, and protections from particular communities, often along racial and economic lines, leaving them more vulnerable to environmental hazards and climate impacts.

Gendered division of labor

The unequal distribution of work according to gender, often assigning women unpaid domestic labor, caregiving, water collection, and agricultural responsibilities while men are more likely to hold paid or publicly recognized positions.

Internal colonialism

The domination and exploitation of marginalized populations within a country's own borders by a more powerful political or economic group, often involving land dispossession, resource extraction, cultural suppression, and unequal access to resources.

Eco-intersectional

An approach that recognizes how environmental inequalities intersect with systems of oppression such as racism, sexism, classism, colonialism, and ableism, emphasizing that environmental problems cannot be separated from social inequalities.

Genealogies

Historical investigations into the origins and development of particular ideas, institutions, inequalities, or social systems. In climate justice, they trace how historical processes like colonialism, slavery, and industrial capitalism produced present-day environmental inequalities.

Procedural justice

Fairness in the decision-making processes surrounding environmental policies and projects, requiring meaningful participation, transparency, representation, and the ability of affected communities to influence decisions.

Community solar

A renewable energy model in which multiple households or organizations share the benefits of a solar installation without needing individual rooftop panels, improving clean energy access for low-income communities as a form of energy justice.

New Social Movements

Collective movements that focus on issues beyond traditional class-based economic struggles, including environmental protection, racial equality, gender equality, Indigenous rights, and cultural identity.

Environmental racism

The disproportionate placement of environmental hazards, pollution, and toxic facilities in communities of color, as well as unequal enforcement of environmental regulations and unequal access to environmental benefits.

Distributive justice

Fairness in how environmental benefits and burdens are distributed throughout society, examining who receives clean air, clean water, and renewable energy versus who bears pollution, hazards, and climate impacts.

Reparations

Compensation, resources, or corrective actions intended to address historical and ongoing injustices, which in environmental contexts can include financial compensation, community investment, clean energy infrastructure, land restoration, and returning decision-making power.

Residential segregation

The separation of racial or socioeconomic groups into different residential areas, often resulting from discriminatory housing policies, redlining, and economic inequality, which concentrates pollution and environmental hazards in marginalized neighborhoods.

Climate change apartheid

A concept describing how climate change disproportionately harms poor and marginalized populations while wealthy individuals and countries have greater resources to protect themselves and adapt, reinforcing existing racial and economic divisions.

Resource management

The planning, allocation, use, and conservation of natural resources such as water, land, forests, and energy, with climate justice examining who controls these resources, who benefits, and who bears exploitation consequences.

Antagonism

Political conflict between groups with competing interests, values, or demands, such as between communities demanding climate justice and governments or corporations protecting existing economic systems.

Commoning

The collective creation, management, and protection of shared resources through community participation rather than exclusive private ownership or centralized control.

Solidarity

Collective support and cooperation between individuals or groups facing related forms of injustice, connecting environmental struggles across racial, economic, geographic, and national boundaries.

Climate change mitigation

Actions intended to reduce or prevent greenhouse gas emissions and limit the extent of climate change, such as renewable energy, energy efficiency, and reducing fossil fuel consumption.

Climate change adaptation

Adjustments to human or natural systems that help communities respond to the actual or expected effects of climate change, such as flood defenses, drought-resistant agriculture, and improved water infrastructure.

Climate change resilience

The ability of communities, ecosystems, and institutions to withstand, recover from, and adapt to climate-related disruptions while maintaining essential functions.

Barefoot College

An organization based in India that trains rural women, particularly from marginalized communities, to become solar engineers who install and maintain solar systems in their villages, demonstrating how renewable energy promotes gender equality and energy access.

Hyde Park

A predominantly African American neighborhood in Augusta, Georgia, studied by Melissa Checker in Polluted Promises, where residents experienced severe industrial contamination in soil and groundwater, illustrating environmental racism and grassroots activism.

Cancer Valley (Cancer Alley)

An approximately 85-mile industrial corridor along the Mississippi River in Louisiana between Baton Rouge and New Orleans, containing numerous petrochemical plants that disproportionately affect predominantly Black communities.

Water Protectors

Indigenous activists and allies who defend water resources against pollution, pipelines, and industrial development, particularly associated with the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe's resistance to the Dakota Access Pipeline.

Solar in St. Louis

A community-based clean energy and sustainability initiative that uses local solar development to address energy inequality and raises the question of whether marginalized residents benefit from the clean energy transition.

Displacement in Africa

The forced relocation of communities to make room for resource extraction and large infrastructure projects that benefit governments, corporations, and international markets while imposing social and environmental costs on local populations.

Inga Dams

Large hydroelectric development projects along the Congo River in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) intended to generate vast electricity, raising concerns about displacement, unequal access, and ecological damage.

Standing Rock protests

Indigenous-led resistance against the Dakota Access Pipeline, which threatened the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe's water supply and cultural sites, linking environmental protection with treaty rights and Indigenous sovereignty.

No Impact Man

A documentary following Colin Beavan and his family attempting to eliminate their net environmental impact in New York City, raising questions about whether individual lifestyle changes can address structural causes of climate change.

Not Without Us

A documentary following climate activists and marginalized community representatives during the 2015 Paris COP21 negotiations, highlighting their exclusion from decision-making and emphasizing grassroots participation.

Power Paths: Native Americans Fight for Green Power

A documentary exploring Indigenous communities' efforts to develop renewable energy while maintaining control over their resources, connecting clean energy development with self-determination and energy independence.

Flip the Switch

A documentary examining community-based clean energy and expanded access to renewable electricity, focusing on how energy transitions can resolve existing inequalities rather than reproduce them.

United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC)

An international treaty adopted in 1992 at the Rio Earth Summit establishing a framework for international cooperation on climate change, recognizing differing historical responsibilities and creating the annual COP meetings.

United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP)

A 2007 declaration establishing international standards for Indigenous peoples' rights, including self-determination, land ownership, control over resources, and free, prior, and informed consent.

California's Global Warming Solutions Act (AB 32)

A 2006 California law requiring greenhouse gas reductions to 1990 levels by 2020 through mechanisms like cap-and-trade, which critics argue allowed pollution to remain concentrated in disadvantaged communities.

Market-based mechanisms of climate justice

Economic policies using financial incentives, markets, or tradable permits (such as carbon taxes and cap-and-trade) to reduce emissions, which critics argue can allow corporations to buy the right to pollute.

Cap-and-trade

A policy that establishes a maximum limit (cap) on total greenhouse gas emissions and allows companies to buy and sell emissions allowances (trade), creating concerns when emissions remain localized in disadvantaged areas.

Conference of the Parties (COP)

The annual international meeting of countries participating in the UNFCCC to negotiate climate agreements, targets, financing, and adaptation policies.

Paris Agreement (2015)

An international climate treaty adopted at COP21 aiming to limit global warming to well below 2°C while pursuing efforts to limit it to 1.5°C through nationally determined contributions (NDCs).

Common but differentiated responsibilities (CBDR)

The principle that all countries share responsibility for addressing climate change, but obligations differ based on historical emissions contributions and economic and technological capacities.

Climate debt

The concept that wealthy industrialized nations owe a debt to poorer countries for contributing disproportionately to historical greenhouse gas emissions while poorer countries bear severe impacts.

Energy justice

The principle that energy systems should provide fair access to affordable, reliable, and clean energy while distributing the environmental and economic costs of energy production equitably.

Energy sovereignty

The ability of communities and nations to control their own energy production, distribution, and consumption rather than depending entirely on outside corporations or governments.

Food sovereignty

The right of communities and peoples to determine their own food systems, emphasizing local control, sustainable agriculture, Indigenous knowledge, and the rights of small-scale farmers.

Climate justice

An approach to climate change that recognizes the unequal distribution of its causes, consequences, and solutions, emphasizing human rights, historical responsibility, inequality, and community inclusion.

Environmental justice

The principle that all people, regardless of race, income, or background, deserve equal protection from environmental hazards and equal access to environmental benefits.

Recognition justice

The acknowledgment and respect of different identities, cultures, experiences, histories, and forms of knowledge in environmental decision-making.

Capability approach

An approach to justice that evaluates people's actual opportunities and ability to live healthy, meaningful lives, which is constrained when environmental inequality deprives them of essentials like clean water and safe housing.

Climate vulnerability

The degree to which a person, community, or ecosystem is susceptible to climate change impacts, influenced by hazard exposure, sensitivity, and adaptive capacity.

Historical responsibility

The idea that countries and industries that have contributed most to historical greenhouse gas emissions bear a greater obligation to address climate change and support vulnerable populations.

Industrial capitalism

An economic system based on industrial production, private ownership, wage labor, and profit accumulation, whose reliance on fossil fuels and resource extraction drives climate change.

Settler colonialism

A form of colonialism in which settlers establish permanent control over Indigenous land, often through displacement, violence, and the suppression of Indigenous political and cultural systems.

Extractivism

An economic model based on removing natural resources from a location, often for corporate export and profit, without adequate regard for local communities or ecological consequences.

Treaty rights

Legally recognized rights established through agreements between Indigenous nations and governments, the violation of which forms a core part of Indigenous environmental justice struggles.

Environmental colonialism

The continuation of colonial power relationships through environmental policies, resource extraction, conservation projects, and development initiatives that undermine Indigenous sovereignty and local control.

Energy colonialism

The imposition of energy projects or systems on communities without their meaningful consent, allowing outside entities to control local resources.

Sacrifice zones

Geographic areas where residents are exposed to disproportionately high levels of pollution and environmental damage because their well-being is treated as expendable for economic development.

Redlining

A discriminatory housing and lending practice that historically denied financial services to predominantly Black neighborhoods, driving residential segregation, disinvestment, and the concentration of hazards.

Environmental privilege

The advantages wealthy and socially powerful populations enjoy through exclusive access to clean environments, safe housing, green spaces, and protection from pollution.

Intersectionality

A framework developed by Kimberlé Crenshaw examining how overlapping systems of oppression, including racism, sexism, and classism, interact to shape people's experiences.

Climate caregiving

The often-unrecognized labor of caring for families and communities during environmental disruptions, such as securing food, gathering water, and caring for vulnerable people.

Epistemic injustice

The unfair treatment or dismissal of someone's knowledge, experiences, or testimony based on their social identity or position, such as ignoring Indigenous ecological knowledge.

Feminization of poverty

The disproportionate representation of women among impoverished populations, driven by unequal employment, unpaid labor burdens, discrimination, and limited resource access.

Political ecology

An interdisciplinary field examining how political, economic, and social power dynamics shape environmental problems and access to natural resources.

Anthropocene

A proposed geological epoch characterized by significant human influence on Earth's systems; critiqued by Nancy Tuana for implying that humanity is universally and equally responsible.

Petro-racial capitalism

An economic system in which fossil fuel industries, racial hierarchies, and capitalist accumulation mutually reinforce one another to reproduce racial and economic inequalities.

Energy democracy

The principle that energy systems should be democratically controlled, enabling public and community participation in energy production, distribution, and ownership decisions.

Just transition

A shift away from fossil fuels toward sustainable energy systems that protects workers, supports affected communities, and ensures costs and benefits are distributed equitably.

Energy reparations

Investments and corrective measures designed to redress historical inequalities in energy access and environmental harm, such as community solar programs offering local ownership.

Carbon offsetting

A system where entities compensate for their greenhouse gas emissions by funding emissions-reduction projects elsewhere, critiqued for allowing polluters to continue emitting.

Prefigurative politics

The practice of enacting the social relationships, institutions, and futures that activists desire within their current organizing practices and alternatives.

Translocal solidarity

Cooperation among communities across different geographic places that recognize shared struggles while preserving their specific local identities and priorities.

Environmental commons

Natural resources and shared environments, such as water, forests, and the atmosphere, that communities collectively rely upon and have a shared responsibility to safeguard.