Publications by Type: Book Chapter

This chapter examines the most promising gains of multiple forms of climate action and the most pressing challenges to future advancements. While significant climate action advances have occurred over the past 30 years, the current impediments to further expansion of efforts are substantial. In terms of institutional climate action, city-level climate planning, green energy transitions, and the expansion of nature-based climate solutions represent major gains in addressing the climate crisis. On the noninstitutional front, both the global climate social movement and local antiextraction struggles made substantial progress in raising awareness and influencing policy outcomes. Major obstacles remain for expanding climate action in the areas of civic engagement, climate financing, carbon reductionism, climate denialism, and growing authoritarian populism.

As human and ecological systems face an existential threat from planetary warming, institutions and collectivities are implementing multiple forms of climate action to address the escalating crisis. Examples of major institutional climate action strategies include climate action planning, nature-based climate solutions, carbon markets and taxes, expansion of green and renewable energy, carbon capture, storage and management technologies, climate public education, litigation and referendums, climate reparations, and a variety of non-institutional mobilizations involving climate protest and anti-extraction actions. Most modes of climate action appear to be driven by various strands of environmental threat—the specter of deteriorating ecological conditions in the face of nonaction. This chapter examines the ways environmental threats motivate multiple types of climate action covered in this Handbook.

The environmental justice and climate justice movements have differing histories and trajectories. One of the promising developments in recent years is a growing alignment between the two movements and recognition of how the previous struggles over environmental justice contribute to the climate justice movement. This chapter describes the driving forces behind the development of the environmental justice movement, including history, goals, and outcomes. It also links the environmental justice movement to current climate advocacy efforts and the most promising forms of practicing climate justice in the contemporary era.