CLIMATE JUSTICE = ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE

Communities for a Better Environment is on the front line of the struggle against the global climate change sweeping the planet, accelerated by fossil fuel production and consumption.

CBE is committed to climate justice—policies that combat climate change and sustain, protect and support communities around the world.

The majority of Earth’s seven billion inhabitants don’t live in the industrialized societies whose economies benefit from burning fossil fuels. But everyone lives with effects of climate change—drought that kills livestock and burns miles of cropland, or rising oceans that could soon devastate entire island nations.

The international agreement at the World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth, April 22, 2010, in Cochabamba, Bolivia (endorsed by CBE), reported that projected temperature increases could mean:

“Between 20% and 30% of species would be in danger of disappearing. Large extensions of forest would be affected, droughts and floods would affect different regions of the planet, deserts would expand, and the melting of the polar ice caps and the glaciers in the Andes and Himalayas would worsen. Many island states would disappear, and Africa would suffer an increase in temperature of more than 3 degrees Celsius. Likewise, the production of food would diminish in the world, causing catastrophic impact on the survival of inhabitants from vast regions in the planet, and the number of people in the world suffering from hunger would increase dramatically, a figure that already exceeds 1.02 billion people.”

CBE works with California communities living with the effects of local pollution, but the fight includes standing with indigenous communities across the globe threatened by climate change.

Through CBE’s clean energy work, CBE is working to help California transition away from reliance on fossil fuels, toward an energy system that is a renewable, rather than one that causes global warming, hastening these impacts.