Forging Just Futures: A Path from Climate Crisis to Climate Solutions

Rapid decarbonization and climate adaptation are urgent to avoid the worst impacts of climate change, but past efforts at large-scale societal change and infrastructure investments have often exacerbated racialized and socioeconomic inequalities and further entrenched the structural drivers and root causes of climate change. We review dimensions of climate justice in the literature and define just climate solutions as those that (a) address root causes and dismantle structural drivers of social inequality and injustice; (b) are community centered and ground-truthed; (c) are reparative and maximally beneficial for historically marginalized populations; and (d) disrupt existing power relations to transform who controls framing, design, implementation, and accountability. We offer a set of guiding questions to help researchers, practitioners, community advocates, and policymakers operationalize this definition to evaluate climate actions in the context of mitigation, adaptation, and disaster response and recovery efforts.