Social and environmental movements continue to converge on their joint call for climate justice, linking equality, individual and collective human rights, and historical responsibilities for climate change as an urgent political and ethical issue. This expression of climate justice acknowledges that environmental hazards and climate-change impacts are unequally produced and distributed across geographies and historical trajectories, across class, gender, race and age.

Climate justice calls for long-term mitigation and adaptation strategies, along with radical change from the production and reproduction of social and environmental injustices. Central and local spheres of government and organized civil society are already forging ahead, developing concrete and bold, climate action plans locally to meet current and future challenges not only to build resilience through climate action but, more progressively, to localize climate justice as an existential and universal human need and aspiration with local, national, regional and international solidarity and cooperation toward remedies and sustainable development that prioritize those historically disadvantaged and currently most effected.

See HIC’s Declaration for World Habitat Day, 4 October, 2021.

When promoting justice, it is vital to specify which theory of justice is being promoted. For types and theories of justice, see The Hictionary: Key Habitat Terms (p. 45). The Agenda 2030 also prioritizes efforts to reach the furthest behind first. Likewise, the form and vision of justice envisioned here requires reconciling inequalities and inequities, and ensuring that the worse off become better off as a priority.