Context Setting: What is the Climate Justice Charter for Vancouver?
By Lindsay Cole, Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Emily Carr University of Art + Design and the Zero Emissions Innovation Centre of Metro Vancouver
Welcome to the Climate Justice Field School (CJFS) learning out loud space. This is where CJFS collaborators reflect on what we’ve been doing and learning in our field school. Thanks for joining us on our journey, and if you have any thoughts on what you’re reading we’d be happy to hear from you.
Climate + Justice
Cities are facing increasing pressures to address complex challenges of climate change, equity, and reconciliation as intersecting issues. It is no longer good enough to work on these challenges discreetly, or solely within the dominant, western colonial paradigm and practices of governance. There are ongoing harms being caused by climate work when it does not embed justice, and there are missed opportunities for synergies across these domains as they have the same systemic root causes. Cities must adapt and transform the processes and practices that they use to work alongside community partners in order to work at these problematic roots. Enacting climate justice, and adaptation to changing climatic conditions through lenses of social and ecological justice, will require new processes that center collaboration, sharing power, and nurturing relationships.
Making of the Climate Justice Charter (CJC)
In 2022, the Climate and Equity Working Group (or CEWG, community members advising the City of Vancouver) produced the first ever Climate Justice Charter (CJC) for Vancouver. The purpose of the CJC is to provide high level vision, guidance, and accountability to the City of Vancouver, as well as to Vancouverites more broadly, by outlining principles, goals, and directions to create a climate just future for the present- and future humans and more-than-humans that call Vancouver home. The CJC situates this work in the disproportionate impacts of the changing climate on different communities, and in how the root of the climate crisis is in past and ongoing colonisation. The CJC describes ten entangled facets of justice needed to move toward climate justice, including: disability; gender, sexual, and reproductive; migrant; health; racial; Indigenous sovereignty; distributive, procedural; restorative; and multi-species justices. You can read the Charter, and find out more about its development, here.
Playing with Power in Implementing the CJC
As the work of CEWG came to a close, the City staff team responsible for stewarding the CJC into implementation wrestled and reckoned with how to do this skillfully and well, and to hold to the vision, purpose, principles, and actions that the community-led CEWG set out for us. We noticed that many aspects of implementing this work would require shifts in the current ways that power is held, wielded, and expressed inside the colonial institution of a city government. We wanted to continue experimenting with and learning about practices of shifting, sharing, and relinquishing power, practicing different forms of accountability, and cultivating different types of relationships in service of climate justice. Through this exploration the idea for a Climate Justice Field School (CJFS) emerged as a collaboration between some of the City of Vancouver staff responsible for implementing the CJC, and Emily Carr University of Art + Design.
The Carbon Neutral Cities Alliance is a network-supporting organization that provided some resources from their Game Changer Fund to lift the CJFS off the ground, and Mitacs funding was then secured to add some additional big-hearted and minded folks to our team. This external funding has been a critical part of the early story of this project as it allowed us to create some more abundant and spacious enabling conditions to explore and experiment, and to take time to create some different starting places and relationships for the work. We began the CJFS in early 2023, and we (the Field School team and our collaborators) are excited to be sharing our learning-out-loud with you as we travel along this pathway. Please be in touch with us with your own questions, reflections, insights, and curiousities.
With thanks to the Carbon Neutral Cities Alliance, Mitacs, and the Real Estate Foundation of British Columbia for their funding support. With thanks to Emily Carr University of Art + Design and the City of Vancouver for hosting this work.
Disclaimer: the opinions and perspectives expressed within each of these posts are solely the author’s and do not reflect the opinions and perspectives of all CJFS participants.
