Climate HQ’s Climate Justice Principles - Extended/Long Version (November 2024)
Climate disruption is a scientific reality with global consequences. This crisis is directly caused by human-created systems and activities like fossil fuel consumption, the industrial food chain, and deforestation, which also negatively affect local communities and entire ecological systems. At its root, climate disruption is a result of colonial and extractive ideologies that treat whole communities and ecosystems as disposable. These ideologies depend on hierarchies of race, class, gender, and other axes of oppression; therefore, addressing climate change requires that we deal with the underlying injustices that brought the crisis into being. While industrialized nations and major corporations are primarily responsible for climate disruption, universities also contribute to the crisis; universities are also key sites of struggle for–and creative development of–solutions.
Climate change is experienced unevenly, with the most severe impacts often falling on marginalized communities that have contributed least to the crisis. The global response to climate change has often excluded these communities and appealed to market-based solutions and technologies that fail to address the root causes of the crisis. Marginalized communities are often at the forefront of solutions rooted in their traditional ecological knowledge systems, resistance to extractivism, defense of biodiversity, and resilience. Because solutions to climate change can alleviate or exacerbate existing inequities and injustices, it is important that climate responses at all scales, disciplines, and sectors are grounded in climate justice.
As an educational and research organization aimed at addressing the climate disruption, the faculty and staff of SFSU Climate HQ affirm the ecological unity and interdependence of all species and commit Climate HQ to the following climate justice principles:
- Centering students’ futures. We commit to fostering hope through understanding, agency, activism, and action with a fierce commitment to students’ livelihoods and futures. We see part of our role as helping students develop their values and navigate the tensions that come up in doing so. We affirm and celebrate our students and their social consciousness, because they understand climate change as an issue of intergenerational justice. We understand that many of our students come from communities which are being disproportionately affected by climate change. It is our responsibility to equip them with the skills necessary to navigate this time.
- Recognizing frontline communities–including young people–as leaders and solution makers. Through our teaching, research, and community engagement, we seek to center the grassroots strategies, solidarity, and solutions that come from frontline communities. Young people are at the generational frontline of climate change and will be most impacted by its long-term impacts. Young people are coming up with solutions to climate change that are often dismissed by leaders. It is our responsibility to pass along the skills necessary to improve on the work that they are already doing in order to have a greater impact.
- Engaging in constructive, transparent, intersectional and inter-, multi-, trans-disciplinary dialogue. Perspectives on climate justice vary and may not always be in agreement. We affirm that naming divergences and tensions is part of working across differences to address multiple forms of injustices. We commit to constructive and transparent engagement within our teaching, research, and involvement with community partners to identify shared goals and values and to forge collaborations based on principles of solidarity and accountability. We also commit to engaging critically with the broader climate justice movements.
- Valuing the multiplicity of knowledge producers. Climate justice requires valuing diverse forms of knowledge, experience, and expertise, including many not traditionally represented in the academy. We seek to listen to, learn from, and follow the leadership of the communities and global social movements that center multiplicity of knowledge producers (Indigenous, scientific, tacit, traditional).
- Engaging in respectful, reciprocal relationships with Indigenous peoples. We are committed to cultivating the right relationships with the Indigenous peoples on whose ancestral and unceded lands our University is situated, including the Ramaytush Ohlone and Coast Miwok Nations and their peoples. We are committed to being accountable as we build our respectful, reciprocal relationships with these Nations, and to ensuring that our actions and principles align with Nations’ laws, priorities, and self-determination.
- Rooting our Research, Scholarship, and Creative Activities (RSCA) in ethical, transparent, systemic, holistic, participatory, intersectional, and relational principles. We commit to respectful, culturally-appropriate engagement with knowledge traditions that are under-represented in academic scholarship. We also value and create avenues to support the participation and training of underrepresented students in climate research.
- Engaging in socially just, inclusive pedagogies. We recognize that centering climate justice in our teaching requires that we use anti-racist, inclusive teaching practices that center and value students and that are drawn from traditions in ethnic and feminist studies.
- Resourcing our initiatives in ways that align with our values. We strive to align, as best we can, our fundraising with our principles and values. We have developed a guide that attempts to articulate our approach to fundraising and factors we consider when seeking funding. We consider this a dynamic process and we commit to transparency and ongoing reflection on the process.