Insights on 5 Climate Justice Questions
By Heather McGray and Hilary Nilsen
Figure 1: A family in Bagerhat, Bangladesh stands in front of household rainwater harvesting technology. Photo credit: Helvetas
With our grant partners, funders, and Council of Advisors, CJRF has invested significantly in learning from our work over the past six years. Recently, we reflected on some of these lessons, drawing from our blogs, webinars, workshops, and grant partners’ reports. This reflection came at a natural point in CJRF’s history—we just completed the first six-year phase of the fund. Our review led us to articulate five key questions we think best frame what we are learning, as well as some insights that begin to answer them. We hope to continue exploring these questions and insights as we revise our strategy and relaunch our grantmaking under the guidance of our new Governing Board.
#1: How can funders best support a climate justice approach to resilience-building?
As the climate changes, people and societies will need to respond more often to extreme and stressful weather and will need to strengthen their ability to contend with frequent disruption. Many people call this ability “climate resilience,” and the term often carries a positive connotation. But others argue that if people are resilient, it makes it easy for politicians and governments to avoid dealing with inequalities and systemic problems that heighten people’s vulnerability. What is often defined as resilience is people’s capacity to endure human-built structures of oppression, such as colonialism, white supremacy, and extractivism. This poses a dilemma for climate justice.
CJRF is learning from our grantee partners how to deepen and broaden our understanding of “resilience.” Real resilience is about being part of interconnected communities that have the tools and resources they need to truly thrive in a changing climate. Building resilience requires uplifting the voices and political power among the most vulnerable so that they may enact long-lasting, holistic solutions to their challenges and dismantle the unjust systems that are holding them back. Our opportunity as funders is to set aside our assumptions about what communities need and listen to their visions and solutions for a climate-safe future. Climate justice grantmaking needs to ensure that those on the front lines of crises are the ones who define what resilience means in their contexts.
Explore this discussion further by reviewing our webinar on “Reframing Resilience.”
#2: How is the youth climate justice movement building its power, and how can philanthropy be an ally?
Today’s youth have been driving new climate action locally and at international levels through grassroots movements that grew rapidly from 2016. Youth activists tell CJRF that one key to their success is ensuring that young people feel a personal connection to the crisis rather than just having an intellectual understanding of it. Youth movements also have made powerful connections between climate and other movements focused on housing, land, racial justice, and other social issues. This has created highly diverse youth climate movements that center justice and are deeply shaped by their values.
Until recently, youth climate activists worked largely through online organizing and street activity that succeeded despite very minimal funding. But youth have creative ideas for projects and programs that need resources, and they’re eager for philanthropy to see them as worthy of support. For example, as they mature, many young people want to continue their activism by developing businesses and building careers that contribute to a climate-safe world. Given how few green jobs yet exist, this requires an infusion of risk-tolerant funding to jump-start new industries. With this huge need for funding, philanthropy risks becoming a significant source of dangerous youth cynicism, given how far the sector still must go in divesting from industries that move the world farther from our climate justice goals.
“I really want to challenge philanthropy to step up, because that’s what youth are doing,” said youth activist and new CJRF Board member Maria Alejandra Escalante. “We’re shutting down the industries that are financing death and violence in our territories. And we’re uplifting the alternatives that center life.”
Dive into this topic deeper by watching our 2022 webinar, “Youth at the Center of Climate Justice.”
#3: How are Indigenous Peoples taking the lead in the climate justice movement?
Figure 2: Elizete Tikuna, an artist, singer, and graffiti artist, shares her story at DocSociety's Climate Story Lab Amazonia. Photo Credit: CSL Amazonia
Indigenous Peoples’ livelihoods, culture, and identity all hinge on a close relationship with the lands, waters, and ecosystems in their territories. As these resources are impacted by a changing climate, Indigenous Peoples frequently face significant challenges, but these are only part of the full picture of what climate change means for Indigenous communities.
Many Indigenous communities around the world use long-held traditional knowledge systems to observe and adapt to climate change. CJRF has learned that Indigenous storytelling, art, and language initiatives are key parts of the climate solutions toolkit, in part because they sustain and evolve Indigenous knowledge. Perhaps more important, such activities also revive and strengthen values that underpin sustainable, regenerative relationships with the earth. These relationships offer an important model to the rest of the world and represent a powerful form of Indigenous leadership on climate justice.
CJRF’s Indigenous partners call on climate philanthropy to ally with them in defending their right to steward their lands—including, in some cases, protecting them from governments, businesses, and NGOs who wish to promote renewable energy or nature-based climate solutions. This right rests on fundamental human rights and provides the foundation for the Indigenous values and knowledge that offer so much hope for the future.
“We’ve seen a lot of cases where Indigenous Peoples own the land where renewable energy projects are happening, but they don’t have their own electricity,” said Robie Halip of the Right Energy Partnership with Indigenous Peoples. “They lose their livelihoods, and they’re forced to migrate outside their communities because there’s no sacred area left where they can conduct their rituals. It’s causing the loss of knowledge.”
Explore this discussion further by reviewing our webinar, “Disrupting False Solutions: Indigenous Rights and Leadership for Climate Resilience Lessons.”
#4: What does climate justice mean for women and girls?
Women and girls can be powerful change agents in their communities. They are often the first to respond to crises and they make key decisions on food, water, and health. Unfortunately, social and cultural structures often keep women and girls out of public decision-making processes, limiting their ability to shape responses to climate change.
Climate justice demands that women and girls have the power and space to advocate for resilience solutions that fit their needs and their families. When women and girls can voice their concerns and share their ideas and solutions, their households and businesses are better able to respond to, and rebound from, climate shocks and stressors. Building voice and power often has an economic component, too. Many CJRF grantee partners support women to diversify their economic activities, grow their incomes, and build savings. Both the diverse livelihoods and the financial cushion protect their families from storms, droughts, illness, and other crises, and they can give women time and space to engage outside their homes.
“We recognize that women can hold transformational roles in their communities,” said Sam Owilly of BOMA Project. “Once women can build some stability for their families, they can take advantage of this stability to meaningfully engage in climate justice activities.”
For additional resources on this question, head to our webinar, “Exploring the Links Between Gender and Climate Justice."
#5: How can funders deepen their commitment to climate justice?
Climate justice fundamentally requires transforming unjust systems that have caused climate change and affect people’s abilities to thrive in this crisis. Climate philanthropy is one such system that can benefit from transformation, moving beyond what we fund to also change how we fund and who makes funding decisions.
While we have a lot more to learn, CJRF’s ongoing evolution to a more participatory grantmaking structure is yielding valuable lessons that we aspire to share. Our funders removed themselves from our grant-making board at the end of 2022, and we replaced them with a diverse global board comprised of activists and practitioners from eight different countries.
This transition away from majority-white, funder-led governance is helping CJRF challenge our biases and colonial ways of operating, which perpetuate power imbalances in climate philanthropy. The board is now leading a process of re-imagining our grantmaking systems and strategy to align our operations and governance more closely with the core climate justice tenet that those on the front lines of the crisis should hold decision-making power.
CJRF Director Heather McGray wrote an opinion piece for Alliance Magazine on how we’re working to shift the power dynamics in global philanthropy. Check out this piece to learn more about our process.
Thank you for joining us on our learning journey! Please look for further lessons from a forthcoming independent review of CJRF’s 2016-22 grantmaking that is scheduled to conclude in October 2023. We look forward to learning with and from our community as the CJRF continues into its second phase.