Photo by Jeanne Menjoulet from Paris, France, Creative Commons Attribution 2.0.
Historically, mainstream the environmental movement and organizations like the Sierra Club have excluded people of color and the issues they face. In the past few years, these organizations have worked to include more people of color and environmental justice issues in their platforms, but there’s still a lot of work to be done. The inclusion of people of color and certain buzzwords like “diversity” and “inclusion” on their websites isn’t enough. It’s not enough to talk about social justice– it has to be put into practice.
Climate adaptation plans put forward by governments can sometimes be the same way. In order to be wholly successful, climate adaptation plans need to center marginalized people and the challenges they face.
But why does social justice matter for climate adaptation?
It matters because people who contribute the least to climate change often face its worst effects, and as the climate crisis worsens, this gap will only widen. Natural disasters will devastate poorer communities as they’ve always done, but climate change will intensify the effects.
Because adaptation plans are implemented through government processes, they often risk reinforcing racial and class disparities. One study that looked at various cities across the globe found that land and resource-use regulations generally affected the poor much more negatively than their wealthier counterparts. Poor people and/or people of color were consistently more likely to be displaced for the sake of land conservation and less likely to be able to access natural resources like food and potable water.
To make matters worse, even with government-implemented plans, a significant amount of funding for climate adaptation projects comes from the private sector. This means climate adaptation can be seen as a private, even exclusive, enterprise that isolates poor folks even more. While the joint efforts of private firms and governments can be seen as a positive for governments, for poor people and people of color who are frequently excluded from the leadership of those two groups, such coalitions are often formed without them and their voices.
An example of this can be seen in Santiago, Chile, one of the most climate-vulnerable cities in the world. Low-income folks in Santiago are much more likely to be affected by water shortages and extreme temperatures than wealthier Santiago residents. Despite the fact that regional climate adaptation programs like Climate Adaptation Santiago, started in 2010, and the Climate Adaptation Plan for the Metropolitan Region of Santiago, launched in 2012, were implemented, they ignored the city’s nearly one million low-income residents.
Framing climate adaptation as only an issue of resilience without centering social justice tends to simply preserve the status quo. The way an issue and its possible solutions are presented affect the way they’re received and implemented. This means that for those on the “bottom” of the socio-economic ladder, there’s not much to gain in supporting climate adaptation policy. Santiago’s low-income residents experienced this firsthand when policies meant to conserve water resulted in less access to potable water for poor folks.
Much of the research that looks at adaptation policy implementation focuses specifically on a top-down approach. In this approach, policy creation and development are separate from implementation, and marginalized voices are rarely heard in these processes because they’re rarely present. As with resilience framing, this approach only perpetuates the status quo, even with the best of intentions. Policies are enacted without considering how they affect everyone, and they end up having unfortunate unintended consequences because they don’t consider how people are affected.
But most if not all problems have solutions. Socially just climate adaptation policies can correct these disparities, while also having the potential to increase the legitimacy of and chances of success for climate adaptation initiatives.
Marrying social justice and climate adaptation isn’t just a distant possibility, but is something that organizations are currently working towards.
Three main strategies can advance socially just climate adaptation:
- actively include marginalized people in such efforts, who can then act as decision-makers in and for their communities,
- acknowledge and understand the roots of social injustices, and
- periodically evaluate implemented plans to ensure that no aspects of these plans, such as timeframe, impede social justice or overlook occurring injustices.
A new framework that builds on these strategies is the advocacy coalition framework. This framework focuses on implementation of climate adaptation policies being in the hands of those who are directly affected. When governmental authorities make decisions regarding institutional rules, resource allocations, and appointments pertaining to a government policy or program, coalitions or marginalized people can represent their communities and assist in refining policy as needed. The resulting decisions come with a set of policy outputs, including intended and unintended outcomes. Policy is not just passed and taken for granted, but evaluated periodically by such coalitions so that marginalized voices are continuously heard, throughout the entire policymaking process.
Applying this framework to cities like Santiago or organizations like the Sierra Club would allow them to reckon with their not-so-inclusive pasts (and presents) and strive towards a more just future, not only for themselves, but the planet as a whole.