Climate change is rooted in unjust global systems, it amplifies multiple other injustices, and thus requires systemic analyses and decolonial responses.
Action for climate justice is integrally connected with human rights, Indigenous rights and land justice, racial justice, democracy, nonviolence, peacemaking, and defending creation. Church leaders must be able to analyze the economic, political, and ideological systems—specifically the legacy of fossil fuel dependency—that contribute to today’s multiple interrelated crises.
Climate change is an unintended consequence of development decisions put into place long ago, bolstered by deliberate policy decisions designed to produce short-term profits and economic growth regardless of the deadly costs to people and the earth. Climate change not only impacts the present—it also forecloses on the future, as coal, oil, and gas corporations continue their efforts to keep the world dependent on fossil fuels.
Climate-justice activists refuse to dismiss the historic responsibility of wealthy nations, which developed on Indigenous lands with the sweat, blood, and lives of enslaved African and Native peoples, by colonizing and waging resource wars against other nations, and by industrializing through the intensive burning of fossil fuels. Now people in poor nations and regions are suffering the early effects of climate change because industrialized nations have overwhelmed the global atmospheric commons with greenhouse gases. The injustice of the global system is not new—it is an ongoing pattern of colonization and subjugation that continues today. Indigenous communities are well aware of this historical context and have been resisting the exploitation of their lands for centuries. They are also at the forefront of many contemporary struggles for climate justice.
The impacts of global climate change amplify other injustices. According to the National Council of Churches, USA: “The impacts of global climate change threaten all creation and will make it more difficult for people of faith to care for those in need. With expected increases in drought, storm intensity, disease, species extinction, and flooding, the impacts of global climate change will increase the lack of food, shelter, and water available, particularly to those living in or near poverty. . . .”
An effective response must include working to transform overarching systems that reinforce multiple forms of injustice. Climate justice includes social, economic, racial, gender, and environmental justice. Organizing for solutions must begin at the local level, but changing the dominant global system requires the building of a global movement strong enough to pressure those at the apex of political and economic power.
This ability reflects a slogan made popular by the global movement for climate justice: “system change not climate change,” which calls for the transformation of the dominant global system that is grounded in colonialism and that perpetuates climate change and a host of other harms.
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