What are the key activities and skillsets involved when taking a climate justice approach to building resilience? This is a question we often grapple with at the Climate Justice Resilience Fund (CJRF). We seek to learn from our community of grant partners, but admittingly, we can get wrapped in the work instead of taking the time to distill and share lessons learned.
In 2022, CJRF launched the Solution Series, a set of webinars where grant partners shared lessons, challenges, and impactful outcomes of their work with our community of grantees, funders, and climate practitioners. Over 2022-23, ten partners shared their experiences and projects—below we share four key approaches that they highlighted as central to building climate resilience through a justice lens.
Approach One: Empower communities to know their legal rights.
Knowledge is powerful. When vulnerable communities understand their legal and human rights, they can advocate for control of their resources. This is critical because community resources—such as land, water, and energy—are often stolen or manipulated to benefit a privileged and influential few. In the context of climate justice, white-owned companies in the Global North and the wealthy minority in Global South countries often dominate natural resources, economic opportunities, and public goods. This corruption leaves communities at even greater risk in the face of climate change as they cannot make necessary adjustments to ensure their safety and ability to thrive.
CNRS works to rehabilitate freshwater canals for communities to use for crop harvesting and fishing. Photo credit: CNRS
In Shyamnagar, Bangladesh, CNRS shared how the Governance for Climate Resilience project rehabilitates freshwater canals for communities to use for crop harvesting and fishing. Often, the first step in the rehabilitation process is for communities to reclaim public access to canal water, which sometimes has been usurped by wealthy elites who have obtained illegal leases from local government. Project partners have educated communities to understand their legal rights to the water sources and organized them to assert those rights. They have successfully helped communities fight the illegal use of canals in court, inspiring neighbors to advocate for their governments to return other canals to the public domain.
Natural Justice Kenya’s strategy also involves empowering communities to use laws and regulations to push for accountability and compliance in major development projects. In Kilifi County, a salt mining company razed a mangrove forest, constructed embankments, and cut off a healthy water source. Natural Justice deployed paralegals to work with the affected communities to apply the laws and regulations that govern development projects in Kenya. This led to letter-writing campaigns and other ongoing efforts to lobby the Kenyan government to implement restrictions on the mine.
Major energy projects—even those deemed “clean energy” often take advantage of Indigenous territories without the consent of the Indigenous communities that live there. Right Energy Partnership explained the importance of Indigenous communities knowing and understanding when these projects violate their rights.
In their Solution Series session, they discussed how in the Philippines, plans to generate power from the Apayao River included the construction of seven large dams. The project organizers completely disregarded that the construction of these dams would submerge one municipality (Kabugao) and devastate large portions of two other communities where Indigenous Peoples live. Because the Indigenous communities understood their rights, they were able to organize against these projects and uncovered that the company and government fabricated agreements to show that the Indigenous territory had been signed over by community elders. Their lobbying efforts gained global attention, and they continue to fight for their land.
Approach Two: Uplift and support traditional Indigenous knowledge and narratives.
For thousands of years, Indigenous Peoples have been the stewards and guardians of land. Their knowledge and approach to climate justice are rooted in these many generations of experience, which has generated an intimate connection to their environment. This often positions Indigenous Peoples to build uniquely effective and community-centered climate solutions.
During the Solution Series, our partners discussed several examples of Indigenous knowledge leading the way for climate resilient solutions. Today, a once-dry river catchment in Tanzania freely flows thanks to the leadership of the Indigenous People who live there. As our Pawanka Fund partners shared, the Maasai people revitalized the river by creating community-run systems for conserving and storing water, drawing on traditional practices. To ensure that the catchment remains a viable water source over the long term, the community also came together to create a set of bylaws to support the revitalization.
An Indigenous person shares their story at the Climate Story Lab Amazonia. Photo credit: DocSociety
The Climate Story Unit of Doc Society offers an example of how Indigenous communities can drive local and global change through creative storytelling. Their documentary, The Territory, tells the story of the Indigenous Uru-eu-wau-wau people fighting against the encroaching deforestation brought by farmers and illegal settlers in the Brazilian Amazon. The film is partially shot by the Uru-eu-wau-wau people, giving the community co-ownership and control of their own story. The community subsequently built an advocacy campaign around the film, and representatives of the Uru-eu-wau-wau presented the documentary to the European Parliament. Following the presentation, Parliament members voted to enact legislation that outlaws imported products from deforested areas of the Amazon.
Approach Three: Support alternative and climate smart livelihoods.
Coastal communities are uniquely vulnerable to climate change. In Bangladesh, worsening storm surges and coastal erosion displace a growing number of households, and undermine farming livelihoods for many others. Two CJRF partners, COAST Foundation and Young Power for Social Action (YPSA), both support communities dealing with these circumstances. In separate presentations, the COAST and YPSA shared how their organizations empower communities to shift to climate smart and alternative livelihoods.
COAST promotes climate-smart farming techniques for households dealing with waterlogging and increasing salinization. For example, sack gardening protects plants from flood waters, which can increase yields for both household consumption and market sales. COAST has found that low-cost income generating activities are the most effective, and that working primarily with women and youth has the highest return on investment for social development and resilience.
In Southeast Bangladesh, YPSA helps displaced people learn into new ways of making a living, and as a result, earn a secure income. During their presentation, they noted that 50% of displaced people are forced to change occupations. By providing skills training in tailoring, goat rearing, and driving, as well as providing start-up capital for trainees to invest in their own income ventures, YPSA is helping to increase project participants’ average monthly income by 3,000 BDT, or about 30 USD. Their efforts are even more impactful on the lives of women and girls—90% of their trainees are female.
Approach Four: Build the capacity of marginalized groups to participate meaningfully in climate decisions and activities.
Marginalized groups, including women, youth, and Indigenous Peoples, often bear the brunt of climate change impacts. Throughout the Solution Series, we learned how CJRF partners are building the capacity of these groups to set, articulate, and pursue their own priorities for addressing the climate crisis.
Christian Aid Kenya believes that local ownership of a project is key to sustainability of its outcomes. They shared their work to ensure that community members—especially women and youth—are involved in the entire lifecycle of a project, including project planning and budgeting. In 2024, Christian Aid aims to further support local ownership by removing itself, as an international organization, from all direct implementation activities.
Photo credit: Indigenous Climate Action
Each year in Canada, Indigenous Climate Action’s Climate Leadership Program trains two cohorts of Indigenous individuals to become climate action leaders in their communities. Participants learn the basics of climate science and policy, as well as tools and methods for organizing communities to build fit-for-purpose climate solutions and advocate for change by government.
Helvetas Bangladesh believes that to create a true rights-based approach to climate programming an organization must guarantee robust and meaningful community participation in projects. They shared several ways they support this, including an important recent power shift in their own implementation approach: HELVETAS recently expanded the Project Management Unit of the Panii Jibon (“Water is Life”) program to include community members participating in the work, not just managers from the partner NGOs.
Throughout the Solution Series, we learned more about how our grant partners are implementing strategies that address the needs of those hardest hit by climate change. Presenters shared many variations on the above four approaches across locations and organizations, along with a rich body of other resilience-building work.
We invite you to visit our Solution Series webpage to learn more about the series or watch past webinars.