This post is written by Kevval Hanna, Director of North America Strategy and Impact at the Centre for Public Impact.

  • The problem: Climate change is a pressing global challenge.

  • The solution: Climate solutions must be built using a collaborative and participatory approach that centres historically marginalised voices.

  • Why it matters: Climate change is the major crisis of our time.

The last seven years were the hottest on record, which has been linked to a host of deadly weather-related disasters. With experts describing this finding as “another nail in the planetary coffin” and “a punch in the face to make politicians and public alike wake up to the urgency of the climate emergency,” there can be no doubt that swift and efficient action is the need of the moment.

Despite coming into 2022 with the freshly minted COP26 objectives, and a host of commitments at country levels, if we don’t carefully proceed with an equity-driven approach to achieve our climate goals, they are ultimately doomed to fail.

While climate change is a global challenge, not all communities bear the brunt equally. As a Black woman born in the island nation of the Bahamas, I know all too well how certain communities have and will bear the brunt of climate change - and how compounding factors like pre-existing health conditions and poor living conditions make individuals in these communities particularly vulnerable.

Even in my current home in the US, a country leading the race to cut emissions targets, Black, Indigenous people, and people of colour (BIPOC) disproportionately experience the impacts of climate change. We saw it when lead contaminated the water in Flint, Michigan and Newark, New Jersey; when we unpacked how environmental racism is tied to COVID-19’s disproportionate impact on BIPOC communities; and when we looked at the devastation of floods in Black neighbourhoods.

"If we do not hear the voices of major segments of our global community and leave them out of climate solutions, those solutions will fail."

An unequal distribution

However, when you look at who dominates and leads most of the conversation around climate change, it is white people. Though Black-led groups, activists, and businesses like the NAACP Environmental and Climate Justice Programme, the Urban Energy Justice Lab, and Uncharted Power have made powerful strides in bringing their voices to bear, Black and BIPOC communities are still not at the centre of the conversation and their input is given only incremental priority in the overall landscape.

For society as a whole to combat climate change, we must find solutions that work for everyone. If we do not hear the voices of major segments of our global community and leave them out of climate solutions, those solutions will fail. While centring equity will look different in every region, country, state, and locality, at the most fundamental level, leaders must empower BIPOC communities to be the architects of solutions.

At the most grassroots form, centring equity is about people. When I worked in social development at the World Bank in Latin America and the Caribbean we would go directly to the most vulnerable individuals - working with anthropologists, local leaders, and social scientists - to understand and take into account real cultural differences. We would be prepared to hear whether planned water irrigation systems would work for a specific group of women in the mountains of Peru. If not, we would collaborate with the community to understand barriers, redesign solutions, and ultimately land on an approach that worked for the community as a whole.

Collaboration and co-operation

This collaborative and participatory approach can be applied to develop functional, local climate solutions. In practice, it means going to farmers or coal miners or small business owners and asking them what they need to be part of the solution — incentives, real-time data, resources, opportunities. It means going to homeowners and finding out how renewable energy solutions such as solar or wind can be incorporated into their lives without breaking the bank or creating storage barriers. It means working to intentionally listen, follow-through, and course-correct when necessary.

This human-centred approach is already gaining traction in US cities where local governments are prioritising climate and developing successful, equity-driven models that could be scaled and adapted for use in other countries and contexts. In Saint Paul, Minnesota, the city is working with community-based organizations to bring electric vehicle car-sharing in low-income communities. Throughout California, the five-year-old Transformative Climate Communities grant program is proving a promising model for community-led climate action. And across the US, 470+ US mayors are centring equity and environment in COVID-19 recovery as members of climate mayors, a network dedicated to real climate action at the local level.

As we step into the new year and are met with another round of climate data that proves its urgency, we must remember that our ability to tackle this challenge relies on how we approach the task at hand. We need government at all levels to incorporate the recommendations and insights from those most impacted to turn our lofty, but achievable, goals into reality. We must remember that seemingly simple climate solutions in our most privileged communities may be entirely unfeasible, or even detrimental, for our neighbours. Most of all, we must understand that climate change is a problem we share, which can only be tackled with the support of all of our communities - particularly those most impacted.

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(Image Credit: Unsplash)