Between Narratives and Climate Justice: Globo and UOL’s Coverage of Activism at the COPs

The Need for a Black Feminist Climate Justice

Climate justice and health education can address the disproportionate health impacts of climate change on minoritized communities by providing frameworks to build awareness and instigate action on climate-related health inequities. The Envisioning Environmental Equity Educator's Guide to Climate and Health Justice provides a framework for educators, activists and health professionals to lead lessons on health and climate justice that center the experiences of those Most Affected People and Areas (MAPA) by climate change. Collaborators in Brazil, the Philippines, and Uganda engaged in stakeholder meetings to assess priorities and needs about climate and health with policymakers, doctors, activists, and students. These meetings informed the product: An educator's guide to climate and health justice that explores their dynamics from an anti-racist, anti-colonial approach. The guide serves as a recommended lesson framework fit with concepts, examples, and activities for educators teaching in primary and secondary learning settings. It is an innovative climate and health justice educational resource that draws on principles of anti-colonialism, critical thinking and consciousness, and engaged pedagogy. It offers a strategy for climate justice communication that targets diverse audiences across climate, health and social contexts by promoting educational approaches that center MAPA experiences, fit for diverse audiences.

In response to perceived failures of formal climate processes, civil society actors have increasingly turned to protest, advocacy, and digital media to promote justice-centric framings of climate action, commonly articulated as climate justice Although climate justice has mobilized millions worldwide, the concept remains contested and diversely interpreted, encompassing multidimensional claims of justice. At the same time, civil society voices, particularly those most affected by climate change, remain marginalized in global climate discourse and policymaking. This study examines how civil society organizations (CSOs) within the Climate Action Network narrate climate justice. Using structural narrative analysis, it analyzes how CSOs construct the subjects of climate injustice, its perceived root causes, and proposed solutions. The findings identify three recurring solution orientations: listening, correcting, and redesigning, through which CSOs frame climate justice as a redistribution of voice, accountability, and transformation. The study shows how climate justice storytelling functions as an iterative process of communicative justice, highlighting the role of communication in shaping how climate injustice and justice claims are understood.

Climate justice is an accelerating global movement in which education plays a vital role in building awareness, understanding and catalyzing action. Yet, many institutions of higher education face persistent barriers to integrating climate justice across disciplines, including limited institutional focus, lack of faculty expertise, and, more recently, heightened political constraints. In response, climate justice educators have proposed a range of strategies—such as conducting faculty workshops, hosting events, offering incentives, increasing funding, and developing curricular tools—though few studies have examined how curricular resources themselves can advance climate justice education. The Climate Justice Instructional Toolkit (CJIT) was developed to address this gap by providing accessible, adaptable materials to help instructors, even those with limited prior experience, incorporate climate and environmental justice into diverse disciplines. Using a novel survey tool across multiple educational contexts, this study used a mixed methods approach to analyze 76 survey responses to evaluate the CJIT’s effectiveness and user experiences among postsecondary instructors, K–12 teachers, and students. The findings showed broad positive feedback regarding the toolkit’s adaptability and utility while underscoring the need for stronger inclusion of Indigenous perspectives, greater socioeconomic accountability, and more attention to solutions and resilience. Respondents also emphasized that inclusive design, community engagement, and institutional support are critical for advancing climate justice integration and empowering educators in this work.

Background: Climate change research has established a clear requirement for policy and policymaking: (1) transformational changes in policy and policymaking to foster (2) ‘climate justice’, including a ‘just transition’ (a movement towards environmental sustainability with equitable processes and outcomes). However, there is a major gap between these requirements and actual policies and policy processes. We identify how researchers use policy theories to understand this gap. Methods: We conducted a qualitative systematic review (2022) to identify peer reviewed journal articles on climate change, policy, justice, and equity in three databases (Web of Science, Scopus, Proquest). Each article had to provide a non-trivial reference to policymaking. We used an immersive and inductive approach to identify key themes and show how the use of policy theories informs climate change research. Results: A total of 108 texts meet the inclusion criteria (with some bias towards Global North research since all texts are in English). Most provide general definitions of climate justice, require fair outcomes and processes, and list what is required to meet those aims. However, they also identify unjust processes and outcomes in relation to who is recognised, gets to define the problem, and wins or loses from solutions. Researchers contrast their preferred social justice approach (informing ‘civic environmentalism) to a dominant neoliberal approach (corresponding to weak ‘ecological modernization’). Conclusions: Researchers focus on what they need from policy and policymaking to produce climate justice. Few engage meaningfully with policy theories to describe how policymaking actually works. More engagement would help to set meaningful expectations regarding policy change and avoid a needless tendency to treat policymaking like a ‘black box’.

This study aims to examine climate justice from the perspective of environmental ethics. While climate justice is often discussed in the context of international, class, and gender inequalities, the inequality between species and the connection to nature are frequently overlooked. This study seeks to propose an environmental ethics-based approach to end the climate crisis justly. The study employs literature review and theoretical analysis methods to examine environmental ethics approaches (anthropocentric, biocentric, and ecocentric) and evaluate the concept of climate justice in light of these approaches. Additionally, it explores the relationship between climate change and justice by drawing on deep ecology and justice theories. The study reveals that climate change creates significant injustices not only among human communities but also between humans and nature. It is found that low-income groups and women are more adversely affected by climate change despite being less responsible for it. Furthermore, the study emphasizes the need to redefine human-nature relationships to achieve climate justice. Climate change is not merely a matter of fair distribution but also a crisis that necessitates restructuring the human-nature relationship. Inclusive and fair approaches from an environmental ethics perspective must be developed to address this crisis. The deep ecology approach, which acknowledges the intrinsic value of nature beyond human needs, provides crucial guidance for a sustainable future. This study contributes uniquely to the literature by addressing climate justice in the context of not only human inequalities but also interspecies inequalities and recognizing nature as an ethical subject.

Abstract. This exploratory study traces the emergence of climate justice claims linked to narratives of Latin American social movements for the defence of life and territory. I argue that in post-colonial settings, religious and historical injustices and socio-cultural factors act as constitutive elements of environmental and climate justice understandings which are grounded in territories immersed in neo-extractivism conflicts. Environmental and climate justice conceptualizations have overlooked the religious fact present in many Latin American socio-environmental movements. As a result, the intertwined notions of divine justice and social justice are unacknowledged. To illustrate this claim, I examine socio-environmental and climate justice claims in a cross-border region between Guatemala and Chiapas. This region has a common ethnic background but divergent historical trajectories across the border. Diverse nuances and intensities adopted by environmental and climate justice practices and narratives on both sides of the border are examined. The case study reveals the importance of religion as a force for collective action and as a channel for the promotion of place-based notions of climate justice. The text calls for the examination of the religious factor, in its multiple expressions, in the theories of climate and environmental justice.

The uneven ways in which climate change is taught (or not) within schools, and the uneven opportunities for students to experience justice‐oriented climate education, are curricular injustices. Recent systematic reviews of Climate Change Education literature note a depoliticising tendency in climate change education, with official curriculum documents rarely engaging with issues of justice. This previous research raises questions about how young people involved in climate advocacy narrate their experiences of learning about climate change and justice in and beyond mainstream schooling. This article, co‐authored with four Research Associates who are also climate justice advocates, explores young people's stories of learning (or not) about climate change and climate justice in school and social movement spaces. These accounts were shared during formal research conversations with 61 people and written in 59 survey responses: all participants identified as involved in youth‐led climate justice networks across Australia. We draw on the concept of curricular justice to analyse the inequitable distribution of opportunities to experience justice‐oriented approaches to teaching climate change for young people in Australian schools. Many of these young people describe turning beyond mainstream schooling to experience critical, collective and creative forms of climate justice education that bring climate change into direct connection with social justice. We argue that listening to young climate justice advocates' accounts of their schooling experiences offers valuable insights about the current conditions for learning and acting on climate change in schools. These insights can productively inform the development of justice‐oriented climate change education.

How can university scholars and community activists effectively collaborate to produce generative, empowering, and materially impactful knowledge and actions concerning climate change and climate justice? In this paper, we report on a collaborative effort between climate justice non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and university faculty and students to conduct research to produce innovative ideas and insights about just transitions in California and to support social movement campaigns aimed at actually reducing greenhouse gas emissions by keeping fossil fuels in the ground. This collaboration was jointly initiated by faculty and students at a California university alongside leaders of local social movement organizations dedicated to climate justice, as a response to several proposed development projects that would expand oil extraction and fossil fuel use in that state. We argue that these efforts produced a climate justice gestalt that serves to amplify our productivity, power, and impact well beyond what any single partner could do separately or individually with respect to addressing climate injustices in our region. This is our plan for addressing climate change from an anti-authoritarian, participatory approach that will speak to new developments in the scholarship on climate and environmental justice studies and collaborative research methods.

While rhetorical approaches are common in communication inquiry, metaphor's role in shaping our understanding of the intersection of environmental and social justice issues has not fully been explored. This essay seeks to address this deficit by examining “Looking Both Ways: Women's Lives at the Crossroads of Reproductive Justice and Climate Justice,” a publication of Asian Communities for Reproductive Justice. The text employs the metaphor of “looking both ways” to argue that climate and reproductive justice agenda setting should be aligned to simultaneously mitigate climate change and advance women's reproductive freedom. I contend “looking both ways” offers an innovative epistemological framework for articulating the intersections of climate and reproductive justice, as well as a convincing rationale for cultivating cross-movement coalitions. However, my analysis suggests that the organization's call to align climate and reproductive justice should be embraced with the acknowledgment that “looking both ways” limits a comprehensive coalitional perspective. This essay enhances current understandings of climate and reproductive justice concerns and demonstrates why diverse stakeholders committed to environmental causes must also support reproductive freedom.

Climate change research has established general requirements for policy and policymaking: transformational changes in policy and policymaking to foster 'climate justice', including a 'just transition' or movement towards environmental sustainability with equitable processes and outcomes. However, there is a major gap between these requirements and actual policies and policy processes. We identify how researchers use policy theories to understand this gap. We conducted a qualitative systematic review (2022) to identify peer reviewed journal articles on climate change, policy, justice, and equity in three databases (Web of Science, Scopus, Proquest). Each article had to provide a non-trivial reference to policymaking concepts or theories. We used an immersive and inductive approach to identify key themes and show how the use of policy concepts and theories informs climate change research. A total of 108 texts meet the inclusion criteria (with some bias towards Global North research since all texts are in English). Most provide general definitions of climate justice, require fair outcomes and processes, and list what is required to meet those aims. However, they also identify unjust processes and outcomes in relation to who is recognised, gets to define the problem, and wins or loses from solutions. Researchers contrast their preferred social justice approach (informing 'civic environmentalism) to a dominant neoliberal approach (corresponding to weak 'ecological modernization'). Researchers focus on what they need from policy and policymaking to produce climate justice. Few engage meaningfully with policy theories to describe how policymaking actually works. More engagement would help to set meaningful expectations regarding policy change and avoid a needless tendency to treat policymaking like a 'black box'.

Over time, international environmental law has increasingly accommodated principles of equity and justice. Yet, climate equity remains a contentious, if not exclusionary, concept. This article applies new materialist theory and a posthuman perspective to climate equity. It explores the concept of climate (in)equity as enshrined in existing climate jurisprudence, and attempts to reimagine the concept in order to incorporate the subjectivity and interests of non-human matter into an otherwise enclosed and marketized climate-change legal discourse. The analysis in this article finds that prejudicial approaches to climate equity that prioritize dominant human subjects produce unjust consequences for excluded, vulnerable human populations and for non-human subjects, with these unjust consequences shaping both policy and lived experience. The article suggests that adopting new materialist/posthuman ontological and epistemological pluralism will support the incorporation of human–non-human entanglements in climate equity, and that such a determination must extend to reforming the inequitable enclosures and exclusions driven by the climate equity assemblage.

This chapter explores climate change and its impact on Botswana, further giving a snapshot into Botswana's climate change policy framework. It unpacks climate justice capability, the framework for assessing climate justice and Botswana's adaptation strategy. The paper anchored its analysis using the climate justice framework to assess the Botswana climate change strategy and examines the challenges inherent in achieving climate justice in Botswana. Based on the agreement known as the United Nations Sustainable Development Framework for 2017-2021, the collective aspirations of the United Nations in Botswana are to move towards greater collaboration, focus, and coherence in programming, and to improve the quality of life for all Botswanans, especially the most vulnerable groups. Botswana has produced a Climate Change Policy and Institutional Framework, which is accompanied by a Strategy and Action Plan to implement the Policy.

Climate change requires global leaders to take domestic action to drastically reduce emissions and to engage urgently in adaptation and in disaster risk reduction, while developed countries need to fund developing countries to support their efforts. It also requires facing the prospect that the loss and damage resulting from climate disasters will not be avoided through adaptation alone, that there will be extensive uncompensated losses, and that millions of climate displaced people may be on the move. The Paris Agreement is the international community's attempt to deal with these challenges. Yet, this article claims that the Agreement, which sets the parameters for the way forward, is a largely neoliberal document that undermines the corrective and distributive ideals of climate justice. Relying on the capabilities approach and a modified version of Amartya Sen's The Idea of Justice, this article teases out the ‘clash of civilizations’ between neoliberalism and climate justice. It sets out the concerns about neoliberalism in the climate change space and proceeds to interrogate the claim that the Paris Agreement is a neoliberal document. Essentially, climate justice demands state-based responses, developed through democratic deliberation and participation, to ensure the survival, functioning and flourishing of humans and non-humans. Neoliberalism, meanwhile, posits that government is too large and complex and that regulatory activities unnecessarily disrupt the efficient operation of the market economy. Furthermore, libertarian ideas of justice undermine climate justice principles as the valorization of market mechanisms, private property rights and private sector actors remove the issues from political contention and democratic participation. Ultimately, I question whether any justice-based normative meta-consensus or discursive meta-consensus, such as the Talanoa Dialogue, might be found in the Paris Agreement to disrupt the international neoliberal agenda.

This chapter provides an overview of the ever-growing climate crisis challenges and the resulting climate (in) justice challenges all over the world, and it discusses the ways in which social work knowledge and practice can actively contribute to addressing these problems. It presents the recent knowledge additions in social work writing, and it highlights the knowledge gaps to connect social work and climate justice; it critically discusses why and how social work education and practice focus on building a holistic climate justice approach to address the growing challenges of climate change, risks, and resource inequities. It advocates that social work curriculum and frameworks should address the human, social, political, and cultural rights of disadvantaged populations in the face of climate change and outlines the future scope of further knowledge contributions and research in social work education and practice in dealing with this climate change crisis. After this, it summarizes the structure and chapters of this book and emphasizes that social work educators and professionals need to transform climate change discussions from science, technocratic, economic, market-based, and policy discourses to eco-social interventions, green social work, and sustainable welfare systems, and environmental and climate justice discourses.