While the climate crisis affects us all, marginalised communities feel its effects the most. The struggles for climate justice and racial, social, and economic justice are inherently interconnected – yet, the vast majority of climate work in Europe lacks an intersectional perspective. 

For example, the climate emergency most adversely affects those lacking access to resilient or secure housing, and extreme temperatures can disproportionately affect disabled people. Communities placed in polluted or toxic environments will experience illnesses that could have been avoided, and bear increased health costs as a direct consequence. Tragic cases like that of Ella Kissi-Debrah, a nine-year-old girl from London who died after repeated asthma attacks due to living close to a polluting highway, and who is the first person to have air pollution as the cause of death on her death certificate, foreshadow what awaits us all unless we take urgent action. 

The current field of European climate activists is white and middle-class-dominated, and priorities in campaigns, policy efforts, and litigation reflect this. While there are great successes in climate litigation, current work does not take an explicitly intersectional approach that foregrounds the disproportionate impact the climate emergency has on marginalised communities. The combination of the absence of this work, the urgency of the crisis, and the explicit call for action expressed in our 2022 community consultation underline the need to build work in this area as soon as possible. 

Through our work, we’re responding to this need. Our Europe-wide Roundtable series in April – July 2022 brought together community activists from across the region, and our climate justice roundtable deliberately moved away from the white, middle-class climate space. The reflections shared say it all. Key opportunities for action that will help shape our future litigation projects came out from those discussions, including how accountability must form part of our solutions to climate injustice. That includes redistributive reparations that address intergenerational harms, and directing resources to communities most affected by climate change. Other opportunities for action focused on collective evidence and raising awareness of disproportionate health and well-being impacts of the air, water, and soil pollution for marginalised groups. You can read more about this here. Our further consultation work in 2023-2024 reaffirmed these views and deepened our understanding of the communities’ needs.  

Building on this foundation, we are currently in the process of building cases with communities and connecting the dots between organisations, movements, and collectives so that together, we can co-create litigation projects that truly benefit those who need it most.  

But building effective litigation must go hand in hand with building collective knowledge and power around it: access to legal knowledge is often mediated by lawyers or legal advisors, reinforcing the unequal relationship between communities seeking justice and legal systems. 

For communities to make informed decisions about whether and how to use strategic litigation as part of their campaigns for change, alongside our litigation work, we aim to help build the knowledge and power of communities, movements, and collectives resisting injustice by developing resources on strategic litigation, delivering workshops and trainings, and, hosting drop-in calls to address communities’ questions. 

A key part of this effort is our Community Toolkit for Change. Designed to support communities in exploring how litigation can serve their goals, the Toolkit consists of three key resources: 

• Strategic litigation: A guide for legal action, which takes the reader through the essential components of strategic litigation; 

• Words for justice: A glossary of essential legal terms, which provides common definitions for a shared understanding of legal terminology; and  

• How can we use the courts: A conversation starter, a simple worksheet to help communities work through some of the baseline questions that come up when deciding if and how litigation can play a role in their campaigns. 

The resources are free to download and use under a creative commons license, and so far are available in Spanish, Somali, Arabic, French, Danish, Turkish, Dutch, and English–with more language translations to come.  

This work also forms part of our wider initiative, Building Black, Indigenous, and People of Colour-led (BIPOC) Power for Climate Justice, which brings together BIPOC-led organisations and youth initiatives to create a shared vision of true climate justice. Through efforts such as the Reclaiming Climate Justice Summit, the Reframing Climate Justice speaker series, and the Whose Planet? The Climate Justice Podcast, we’re working to ensure that Europe’s response to the climate crisis recognises its intersectional harms and centres those most impacted. 

Through these interconnected strands of litigation, knowledge-building, and power-sharing, we aim to reshape the landscape of climate action in Europe. By centring BIPOC leadership, collective learning, and community-driven strategy, we aim to challenge the dominance of white, middle-class perspectives and build an intersectional movement for climate justice.  

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