Reflections on our First Climate Workshop: Climate Justice is Racial Justice

This event is part of our Where Climate Meets Race project, a three-year programme supported by the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation looking to catalyse deeper and more inclusive engagement on climate from racialised and marginalised communities. You can learn more about our climate justice work here: Climate Justice | V4CE Environmental Strategy

This month, we were delighted to kick off our Where Climate Meets Race project with a workshop introducing the intersections between climate justice and racial justice. This session had over 60 attendees and gave us the opportunity to introduce the project and set the scene. To do so, we reflected on ideologies such as the ‘Doctrine of Discovery’ and notions of private property during times of imperialism and colonialism that legitimised land theft and justified a racial hierarchy of how land, labour, and resources were and continue to be extracted.  

We introduced terms such as carbon colonialism and waste colonialism which depict the outsourcing of carbon emissions and waste from countries and corporations based in the Global North to the Global South. With the amount of plastic that is being produced – waste that can only be incinerated or dumped – Asian and African countries have become dumping grounds for the biggest waste producers across Europe, the United States, Japan, and Australia since China’s ban in 2018 on plastic waste imports.  

At a more local and national level, we captured how the burdens of the climate crisis and benefits of climate action have been unevenly spread. From disproportionate exposure to environmental harms such as air pollution, polluted rivers, and flood risk, to a lack of access to green and blues spaces of both quality and quantity, racialised and marginalised communities are made most vulnerable to the climate emergency.  

Existing disadvantages across housing, employment, access to public services such as public transit, rising living costs, and the fact that they are less likely to work in the environmental sector and hold key policy decision-making positions within these spaces, compound and deepen this vulnerability. Without a targeted approach that rectifies these disparities and equips those most affected, we end up excluding communities with the most at stake from shaping pathways towards a just transition.  

The rise in far-right political extremism and widespread alienation and disillusionment with our current state of politics makes it critical to continue highlighting the alternatives and possibilities of a more progressive world. And specifically, to draw attention to the cross benefits of climate action that take us away from the exploitation and degradation of people and nature. With this in mind, we finished the session with a discussion on broadening and politicising the conversation on climate by: 

1. Being louder but more strategic on our climate messaging: Bearing in mind that only one in ten British people were found to regularly express their climate views, resulting in a silent majority. 

2. Telling a different story: Revisiting and challenging ones we have been told about civilisation, success, and identity, as well as flipping the script to focus on the power and perspectives of frontline communities beyond the disproportionate harms they continue to face. 

3. Reimaging how we live and work: Designing a society and economy around principles of care, love, generosity, simplicity, and joy, and prioritising our time and resources differently. 

4. Pursuing connection and community: Engaging in different forms of art, activism, protest, and the active building of community to continue bringing climate and nature into the mainstream. 

We now look forward to our first Climate Cafe on the 3^rd of October which will take place every other month. This session will be focused on creating a safe and supportive peer-learning space to build on discussions and topics explored in the first workshop. There will be no need to come equipped with all the answers and solutions. Instead, we hope you come ready to share, be open with one another, and pose questions that we can tackle as a collective going forward. We hope to see you there!  

If you’re interested in finding out more about the critical intersections between climate justice and racial justice, don’t forget we have a suggested reading list on our main Climate Justice webpage: Climate Justice | V4CE Environmental Strategy