In 2018, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) highlighted the unprecedented scale of the challenge required to keep warming to 1.5°C (or 2.7°F). Five years later, that challenge has become even greater due to a continued increase in greenhouse gas emissions.
The warning
The IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Synthesis Report warns that the pace and scale of climate action are insufficient to tackle climate change. More than a century of burning fossil fuels as well as unequal and unsustainable energy and land use has led to global warming of 1.1°C (2.0°F) above pre-industrial levels. This has resulted in more frequent and more intense extreme weather events that have caused increasingly dangerous impacts on nature and people in every region of the world.
According to the IPCC, every increment of warming results in rapidly escalating hazards. More intense heatwaves, heavier rainfall, and other weather extremes further increase risks for human health and ecosystems. Increased warming also increases food and water insecurity. As risks combine and grow, they become even more difficult to manage.
Taking the right action now could result in the transformational change essential for a sustainable, equitable world.
The challenge
We need to cut greenhouse gas emissions by nearly half by 2030 to create a safer and more sustainable world. We need to scale up practices and infrastructure to enhance resilience. This climate action needs to happen along several dimensions and needs to be designed for diverse contexts. Further, increased financing for climate action at a level three to six times the current climate investment is needed.
The hope
Mainstreaming effective and equitable climate action now will reduce losses and damages. We currently have multiple, feasible, and effective options available to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. We have the ability to adapt to human-caused climate change.
Integrating measures to adapt to climate change with climate action provides wider benefits:
Improving people’s health and livelihoods
Reducing poverty and hunger
Providing clean energy, water, and air
The resilience
Fairness is one of the solutions. and lies in developing climate resilience. This involves integrating measures to adapt to climate change with actions to reduce or avoid greenhouse gas emissions in ways that provide wider benefits.
“Climate justice is crucial because those who have contributed least to climate change are being disproportionately affected.”
-Aditi Mukherji, one of the 93 authors of this Synthesis Report
Climate resilient development becomes progressively more challenging with every increment of warming. This is why the choices made in the next few years will play a critical role in deciding our future and that of generations to come.
Resiliency to be effective needs to be rooted in our diverse values, worldviews, and scientific, Indigenous Knowledge, and local knowledge. This approach will allow locally appropriate, socially acceptable solutions.
Our climate is interconnected with society and ecosystems. Effective and equitable conservation of approximately 30-50% of the Earth’s land, freshwater, and ocean will help ensure a healthy planet. Changes in the food sector, electricity, transport, industry, buildings, and land use can reduce greenhouse gas emissions, foster low-carbon lifestyles, and enable health and well-being. A better understanding of the consequences of overconsumption can help people make more informed choices.
Americans don’t agree on much these days, but many feel that the U.S. is on the wrong track and the future is bleak. In a time of unprecedented division, rising inequality and intensifying climate change, it’s easy to feel that progress is impossible.
In fact, models exist all around us for building safer and more equitable spaces where people can thrive.
The organizations that we profile are small, but they make big impacts by crafting alternatives to neoliberal capitalism – an approach to governing that uses austere economic ideas to organize society. Neoliberalism aims to put government in service of corporations through measures such as deregulating markets, privatizing industries and reducing public services.
Here are three groups we see building something better.
Humans being, not humans buying
Some groups build better systems by rejecting neoliberalism’s hyperindividualism. Individualistic logic tells people that they can make the biggest changes by voting with their dollars.
But when people instead see how they can create real political changes as part of communities and collective systems, amazing things can happen. One example is the Thunder Valley Community Development Corporation, a nonprofit on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, one of the poorest areas in the U.S.
Thunder Valley Community Development Corporation leaders describe how they are drawing on their people’s history and legacy to build a strong and healthy community.
Thunder Valley focuses on healing from daily traumas, such as poverty and high suicide rates. Its goals include teaching the Lakota language across generations, empowering young people to become community leaders and promoting food sovereignty by raising food for the community in greenhouses and gardens.
Thunder Valley’s other programs are designed to create community and security in ways that lift up Lakota approaches. For example, its housing initiative works to increase access to affordable housing and provides financial coaching. Homes are built and neighborhoods are designed according to Lakota traditions. The organization views home ownership as a way to strengthen community connections rather than simply building individual wealth.
Thunder Valley’s programs also include a demonstration farm and a Lakota immersion Montessori school. In 2015, President Barack Obama recognized the organization’s work to heal and build a multigenerational community as a Promise Zone – a place building innovative collaborative spaces for community development.
Claiming space by making music
Brass and percussion street bands play for free in many U.S. communities. They form mainly in cities and are deeply linked to contemporary urban justice issues.
Acoustic and mobile, these bands play without stages to elevate them or sound systems separating musicians from audience. They invite crowds to join the fun. They may play alongside unions and grassroots groups at political protests, or in parades or community events.
The common factor is that they always perform in public spaces, where everyone can participate. Street bands create bridges across social divides and democratize spaces, while inviting play and camaraderie amid huge social challenges.
Band leader and composer Jon Batiste leads a peaceful protest music march through the streets of New York on June 12, 2020, following the death of George Floyd while being detained by police in Minneapolis.
In the 19th century, brass bands flourished all over the U.S. and Europe. In the U.S. South, street bands emerged from benevolent societies – social organizations that helped free and enslaved Black Americans cope with financial hardships. These groups eventually morphed into “social aid and pleasure clubs,” the forces behind New Orleans’ famous parades.
Today, the brass band movement convenes yearly through the HONK! Festival in cities across the country such as Boston; Providence, Rhode Island; and Austin, Texas. Drawing on a tradition of protest, HONK! events are designed to assert that performers and ordinary people have a right to occupy public space, as well as to disrupt state or corporate events.
Affordable community-based energy
Other groups find ways to build economic systems that serve communities rather than private companies or industries.
That’s the goal of the Indigenized Energy Initiative, a community-owned, nonprofit solar cooperative in Cannon Ball, North Dakota. The organization was founded following protests on the Standing Rock Reservation against the Dakota Access Pipeline, which carries oil from the Bakken formation in North Dakota to a terminal in Illinois.
Indigenized Energy’s executive director, Cody Two Bears, emerged from Standing Rock protests aiming to build the first solar farm in oil-dependent North Dakota. The organization aims to provide low-cost solar energy for all community members, promoting energy independence.
Today, the Cannon Ball Community Solar Farm has 1,100 solar panels and a 300-kilowatt generating capacity – enough to power all of Cannon Ball’s homes. The farm sells its power into the state grid, earning enough to offset the electricity bills of the community’s veteran and youth centers.
Longer-term goals include building tribally owned transmission lines, installing solar panels on tribal homes and community buildings and expanding support for solar power in North Dakota.
A picture worth a thousand words. See how IEI is leveraging the power of renewable energy as a means to diminish poverty, mitigate climate change, and promote a self-determined restoration of sovereignty and hope to Indigenous communities.
— Indigenized Energy Initiative (@Indigenized_IEI) July 26, 2022
Building better systems
We see similarities among these organizations and others in our book. Initiatives like commmunity-owned solar cooperatives and collective models for home ownership and neighborhood planning aim to build economic systems that meet community needs and treat people equitably. Instead of finding answers in individual consumption or lifestyle changes, they build collective solutions.
At the same time, communities across the U.S. have different views of what constitutes a good life. In our view, acknowledging different experiences, goals and values is part of the work of building a shared future.
In recent years, many scholars have pointed out ways in which neoliberalism has failed to produce effective solutions to economic, health, environmental and other challenges. These critiques invite a deeper question: Are people capable of remaking the world to prioritize relationships with one another and with the planet, instead of relationships to wealth? We believe the cases in our book show clearly that the answer is yes.
Authors:
Stephanie Malin Associate Professor of Sociology; Co-Founder, Center for Environmental Justice at CSU, Colorado State University
Meghan Elizabeth Kallman Assistant Professor of International Development, UMass Boston
Disclosure statement Stephanie Malin has received funding from the National Science Foundation, the Colorado Water Center, the National Institute for Environmental Health Sciences (a branch of NIH), the Rural Sociological Society, and CSU School of Global Environmental Sustainability.
Meghan Elizabeth Kallman is a Democrat representing District 15 (Pawtucket, North Providence) in the Rhode Island Senate. She is a co-founder of Conceivable Future, a women-led network of Americans bringing awareness to the threat climate change poses to reproductive justice and demanding an end to US fossil fuel subsidies.
