Climate justice is the recognition that climate change is not an equal-opportunity crisis. Those least responsible for greenhouse gas emissions — Indigenous peoples, Global South populations, low-income communities, communities of color — bear disproportionate consequences: displacement, food and water insecurity, extreme weather, loss of land and livelihood. The structures that produce emissions (fossil capital, industrial agriculture, extractive economies) are the same structures that produce vulnerability (settler colonialism, racial capitalism, extractivism).
Climate justice insists that the climate crisis cannot be addressed through technocratic solutions that leave these structures intact. Carbon markets, geoengineering, and green growth proposals that do not confront the distribution of harm reproduce the injustice they claim to address. The demand is not for a more efficient version of the existing system but for the transformation of the relationships — to land, to labor, to other species — that produce both the emissions and the unequal exposure to their consequences.
From a decolonial perspective, climate justice includes the recognition that Indigenous peoples have been stewards of the ecosystems that industrial civilization is destroying, that land defense is climate action, and that land back is a climate policy. The relational framework clarifies why: the climate crisis is a crisis of relations — severed relations between human communities and the lands and ecosystems that sustain them, replaced by extractive relations that treat the living world as a resource depot.