Eight Principles for More Effective and Equitable Climate Action

Photo by Katie Rodriguez on Unsplash

In this moment — as a global pandemic persists, economies falter, healthcare systems crack and systematic racism and injustice are exposed — we, the climate community, must widen our lens and open our eyes.

To more effectively and equitably stop climate change, we must embrace and learn from the change happening around us — and rapidly change what we do and how we do it.

At the core of this shift is the recognition of the inextricable link between climate change and the issues of poverty, inequality and race. As climate justice advocate Mary Annaïse Heglar recently wrote, ”Climate change is not the Great Equalizer. It is the Great Multiplier.”

What follows is a snapshot of our rapidly shifting landscape, and a roadmap of sorts, to get us on a more inclusive, just and productive path forward. We cannot turn back.

1. It is no coincidence that we are experiencing a convergence of multiple crises, including:

• The continued existential threat of climate change;
• A national reckoning with systemic racism in America — sparked by the murder of George Floyd and the police brutality that has been inflicted upon countless Black people before him — that has brought hundreds of thousands into the streets in protest;
• The COVID-19 pandemic, which is stretching a frayed healthcare system to the breaking point and disproportionately sickening communities of color already underserved by the status quo;
• The economic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, which is accelerating existing inequalities;
• The increasingly precarious nature of work, the rise of automation, and the growth of low-wage service sector jobs and decline of family-sustaining jobs;
• The further disintegration of US-China relations and the growing likelihood of future conflict between the two global powers;
• The rise of authoritarian national leaders across the globe and the weakening of post-WWII institutions for global collaboration like the UN and WHO.

These issues cut across scales and stressors — they impact health, equity, governance prosperity; they are global and existential but also inherently local in nature.

2. These crises are converging because they are all related. The crises we now face derive from a set of intersectional¹ preconditions, including racism, structural inequality and an extractive economy, and they require integrated, cross-sectoral solutions. Our approach to achieving a climate-safe future must reflect this reality.

“Strategies to date have largely been predicated on the gospel of gigatons…”

3. Despite the integrated nature of these crises, we continue to combat climate change in silos. Strategies to date have largely been predicated on the gospel of gigatons, stabilization wedges, flow charts, and McKinsey cost curves. We have approached climate change as a math problem — a puzzle to solve with models and economic equations that solve for cost-effective emission reductions. We have relentlessly focused through the lens of the biggest possible greenhouse gas reductions — targeting a handful of big-emitter countries and even fewer sectors (electricity, transportation, buildings, and industry). This approach has been credited with big changes — including the transformation of the electricity markets — yet falls short of delivering the full decarbonization in every community, every sector, every nation we know we need by midcentury.

And these approaches ignore the distributional issues inherent in climate action: who will gain and who will be asked to sacrifice, where, and by how much? The answers to these questions reveal competing moral imperatives that interfere with our ability to adopt meaningful enforceable emission reduction policies. People don’t want to have to choose between putting food on the table and clean air, or between supporting their families today and ensuring a livable planet for tomorrow, but too often climate advocacy has presented these as tradeoffs, with devastating political consequences.

While eliminating fossil fuel-based power generation and transportation are critical elements of a holistic climate mitigation strategy, doing so without social justice considerations perpetuates inequality across society. By focusing on emissions sources, rather than the conditions that have enabled these sources to perpetuate, we continue to focus on the symptoms rather than the root causes of the climate crisis. And, we fail to build the broad political coalition necessary to shift policy priorities.

4. We have no time to waste and the longer we wait, the worse the impacts will be. We know that the current reality pales in comparison to the future suffering wrought by unchecked climate damage. At present rates of GHG emissions, global mean temperatures will reach 1.5°C in the 2040s. Limiting global warming to 1.5°C will require a rapid phase out of net global carbon dioxide emissions and deep reductions in non-CO2 drivers of climate change. We are running out of time to avoid catastrophic climate change, and while existing theories of change have achieved a great deal, they have not yet led to the scale of transformation required to meet the challenge. The strategies that promise quick wins have often failed to prove out in practice.

“…while existing theories of change have achieved a great deal, they have not yet led to the scale of transformation required to meet the challenge.”

5. Fortunately, more equitable, integrated and cross-sectoral climate strategies will also be more effective in achieving our climate goals, including around adaptation and resilience. We know that physical systems are incredibly dynamic and responsive to their environments, including human actions. And human actions are subject to a wide-ranging set of factors, including economic and political contexts, shifting public opinion, current events, and seemingly even more mundane (but critical) minutiae, like the right data displayed in a compelling and actionable way by trusted messengers, or the competency of staff working on a given policy.

By understanding the social, cultural, political, scientific, and economic dynamics, and by engaging locally and garnering community input, we can identify new, powerful leverage points to accelerate positive change. One example of how to do this work is California’s Transformative Climate Communities Program (TCC), a community-led program for sustainable transformation across the state. The state’s Strategic Growth Council (SGC) awarded $179 million in the first two rounds of TCC, supporting five implementation grants in communities most affected by pollution and poverty. These funds, combined with ongoing technical assistance, are enabling communities to collaboratively design and implement their own goals, strategies, and projects to achieve major environmental, health, and economic benefits, and centers solutions in processes driven by local input and engagement. This is just one example of a cross-cutting model that has promise and could be applied elsewhere.

“More equitable, integrated and cross-sectoral climate strategies will also be more effective in achieving our climate goals…”

6. Addressing endemic racism and inequity in the climate movement is one part of the solution when it comes to achieving more effective and durable climate action. Like every part of our society, the climate community must reckon with our own role in perpetuating systemic racism, and identify a clear path forward for how we will do better. One study found that 88 percent of staff and 95 percent of environmental NGO boards are White. Amongst the foundations that fund them, 92 percent of foundation CEOs, and 89 percent of executives on foundation boards are White. Climate philanthropy in particular must acknowledge that its own predominantly White male power structure has benefitted from and perpetuated historical power imbalances, and that these imbalances have flowed to grantees. Combating climate change and environmental injustice requires transforming and transcending institutions that are disproportionately powerful.

7. It’s time to put our money where our mouth is and shift from community engagement to community empowerment. According to the Philanthropic Initiative for Racial Equality, only about 8–9 percent of grant-making goes into communities of color in the U.S. Climate philanthropy has often funded “well-established” organizations at the expense of organizations that focus on equity, take a more integrated approach, and serve communities of color, leaving them perpetually anemic and under-resourced. Only a fraction of the billions committed by philanthropy to the climate crisis has gone to organizations led by Black people and people of color or to environmental justice and equity-related work. Empowering a diversity of voices, particularly from communities that have been closest to the causes and consequences of climate change to date is not only a moral imperative, is critical to driving more effective, lasting change. The California Endowment’s Building Healthy Communities $1bn initiative is an example of how place-based efforts to build power in communities can help achieve policy and systems change. Philanthropy must invest in a paradigm shift in its own thinking.

8. A more effective, and more equitable approach is possible. Many of the existing efforts to define a more equitable, cross-sectoral approach to tackling the climate crisis — for example the Green New Deal, USCAN’s Vision for Equitable Climate Action, and the Equitable and Just National Climate Platform — have been criticized for being too general, or for offering broad principles rather than specific recommendations. At the same time, the translation of these principles into implementable, effective strategies and policies is possible and necessary. In part this requires a focus not only on what policies are proposed but also how they are advocated for and implemented. Ensuring communities are engaged in the organizing process from the start ensures that policy solutions are designed to fit their needs, and in turn, that there will be more support for their adoption.

Just transition for communities of color and low-income communities represents one example of an opportunity where more can be done to support communities from the beginning, and where philanthropy can be deliberate about the “how,” to support programs and policies that both address polluting emissions and ensure well-compensated and dignified work. In addition to being more effective, better integrating climate into other critical policy and social agendas also helps inoculate the issue against being sidelined as governments and other decision-makers focus on pressing concerns of racial justice, the global pandemic, stimulus and recovery.

Successfully addressing climate change will require moving beyond a siloed, sectoral approach and towards one that is more integrated, cross-sectoral, and place-based. Climate solutions must address the intersectionality of the climate crisis with race, poverty, and inequality, and be connected with and integrated into ongoing work to address other fundamental societal challenges — from health, to economic recovery, to racial justice. Only through this approach can we build the broad political coalition necessary to beat climate change. There’s no time to wait.

[1] The term “intersectionality” comes from the 1989 work, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics,” by Kimberle Crenshaw. It was originally used to refer specifically to the exclusion of Black women from feminist theory and antiracist policy discourse, and the failure of each to due to accurately reflect the interaction of race and gender. Crenshaw wrote, “Because the intersectional experience is greater than the sum of racism and sexism, any analysis that does not take intersectionality into account cannot sufficiently address the particular matter in which Black women are subordinated.” Over time, the term has been used to refer more broadly to refer to people who are subject to multiple forms of oppression in society, and/or to describe a broad variety of fields and their interrelatedness, from politics, to economics, from education to employment. In this document the term “intersectionality” is used to refer to the connections between the climate crisis, and other underlying societal challenges including and especially racism, that must be addressed. In other places where this piece speaks to the need for solutions to be integrated, we use either the term “integrated” or “cross-sectoral,” to mean cutting across the traditional silos applied to climate solutions.