CLIMATE JUSTICE

📝 Our assessment

The climate crisis is a direct result of systemic injustices, from unsustainable economic models to historical inequalities in resource consumption and environmental degradation. Vulnerable populations, despite contributing the least to the crisis, bear its greatest burdens, suffering from displacement, loss of livelihoods, food insecurity, and environmental health hazards.

Key challenges include:

• Disproportionate Impacts: The most affected by climate change are those with the fewest resources to adapt—low-income communities, indigenous peoples, small-scale farmers, and coastal and urban poor populations.

• Loss and Damage: Climate-induced losses and damages require urgent responses that center justice and equity and that consider economic and non-economic aspects.

• Inequities in Climate Finance: The financialization of climate action risks exacerbating inequalities if funding remains inaccessible to the most vulnerable communities and subnational governments.

• Structural Barriers to Local Climate Action: National policies often fail to integrate local realities, hindering efforts by cities and territories to implement effective climate solutions.

• Urban and Territorial Vulnerability: Poorly planned urbanization and infrastructure intensify climate risks, especially in informal settlements lacking basic services.

🤝 Our commitment

Local and regional governments are at the forefront of climate action and equity. They commit to leading climate justice efforts through inclusive governance, equitable policies, and transformative climate action frameworks that leave no one behind.

• Embedding Justice in Climate Policies, embedding Ecological transformation in social policies: Recognizing the right of and to nature as a fundamental human right is essential to advancing environmental justice and intergenerational equity. Climate strategies must center vulnerable communities through participatory governance that shifts power and ensures those most affected shape the solutions. This requires bold advocacy for legal and financial mechanisms that enforce accountability for climate impacts and historical emissions, placing justice at the heart of climate action.

• Building Climate-Resilient and Equitable Cities and Territories: Strengthening climate-adaptive urban planning is key to building just and resilient territories, placing nature-based solutions, equitable resource access, and sustainable infrastructure at the center. Green transitions must expand—not restrict—access to basic public services such as clean energy, water, and housing, ensuring they reduce rather than deepen socio-economic inequalities. Investing in local food systems and sustainable agriculture is equally critical to enhancing food security and climate resilience, particularly by reinforcing rural-urban linkages and territorial cohesion.

• Ensuring Fair and Equitable Climate Finance: Demanding just climate financing mechanisms that prioritize local governments is essential to support frontline communities facing the brunt of the climate crisis. Strengthening direct access to climate funds for cities and territories ensures that adaptation, mitigation, and loss and damage responses are locally driven and grounded in real needs. Redirecting subsidies away from fossil fuels and unsustainable industries toward social and environmental investments is a necessary political shift to advance climate justice and deliver tangible benefits to the most vulnerable populations.

• Fostering a Just Transition and Green Jobs: Promoting inclusive green economies requires placing people at the center of the transition by supporting workers in shifting industries and creating dignified, sustainable employment. Investments in education and capacity-building must empower local communities, youth, and informal workers to actively shape and benefit from the green transition. Supporting cooperatives and local enterprises that drive sustainable economic transformation—while upholding fair labor rights—is essential to ensuring that climate action advances both environmental sustainability and social justice.

📢 Our call

• Multilevel climate governance must integrate and support local action, ensuring that cities and territories have decision-making power in climate governance. National and global policies should fully recognize the role of local and regional governments in shaping climate agreements, financing mechanisms, and policies. The alignment of governance structures will create a more effective and just response to climate challenges.

• Addressing loss and damage is a matter of social justice in development that requires urgent financial commitments from the global community. Financing mechanisms must be designed to directly support communities facing irreversible climate impacts. Local and regional governments must have direct access to climate finance for loss and damage recovery efforts, ensuring that those most affected receive timely and equitable assistance.

• Equity in climate finance and just transition policies must be prioritized by international financial institutions, ensuring that climate finance is equitably distributed. Vulnerable communities must be placed at the center of funding decisions, rather than allowing profit-driven models to dictate climate investments. Governments and multilateral organizations must shift from extractive economies to regenerative, community-led solutions that foster long-term resilience and sustainability. Transforming financial priorities will ensure a fair and inclusive transition to a greener world.