Climate Justice

This course introduces students to the foundations of climate justice by connecting climate science, inequality, and human impacts. Students begin by learning what climate justice means and why climate change disproportionately affects low-income communities, Indigenous peoples, communities of color, and nations in the Global South. The course then builds basic climate science literacy by explaining Earth systems, climate data, and the physical processes driving climate change. Finally, students examine climate migration and refugees, exploring why climate-driven displacement is not simply a natural misfortune but a justice issue shaped by vulnerability, adaptation gaps, and unequal global responsibility. Together, these lectures establish climate change as both a scientific crisis and a social, political, and ethical challenge.

This course examines how climate goals are translated into meaningful action through energy transitions, public policy, and collective movements. Students begin by exploring the just energy transition, examining how the shift away from fossil fuels involves not only technological innovation but also questions of employment, energy access, economic opportunity, and how the costs and benefits of transition are distributed. The course then turns to climate policy, exploring how governments respond to climate change through legislation, regulation, executive action, and market-based approaches, as well as how social movements can influence policy and advance climate justice. Finally, students examine the global climate justice movement as a diverse “movement of movements,” considering the organizations, communities, strategies, and visions shaping collective responses to climate change. Across these lectures, students learn that meaningful climate action requires more than reducing emissions; it requires transforming systems and institutions while considering who participates in change, who bears its costs, and who benefits from its outcomes.

This course explores natural climate solutions through wildfire justice, regenerative agriculture, tropical forest protection, and climate equity. Students examine wildfire as a climate justice issue shaped by climate change, fire suppression, housing inequality, labor vulnerability, and the exclusion of Indigenous fire stewardship. The course then turns to regenerative agriculture, showing how soil carbon, biodiversity, prairie restoration, polyculture farming, and ancestral food systems can help address climate change while repairing relationships among land, food, culture, and community. The final lecture expands the course globally by examining tropical forests, REDD+, carbon markets, forest offsets, and the role of Indigenous peoples and local communities in forest protection. Across all three lectures, students learn that natural climate solutions are not simply technical tools for carbon reduction; they must also address land rights, community leadership, historical injustice, and ecological care.

This course examines how communities experience, resist, and adapt to climate injustice. Students explore how racial injustice, environmental harm, incarceration, labor exploitation, and grassroots movements are deeply connected to the climate crisis. The course then introduces community resilience and climate adaptation, focusing on how communities prepare for and respond to climate impacts such as wildfires, flooding, hurricanes, and extreme heat. Through the example of coastal adaptation, students also examine how strategies like seawalls, managed retreat, and climate infrastructure can either reduce vulnerability or reproduce displacement and inequality. Overall, this course emphasizes that just adaptation must be community-driven, historically informed, and rooted in equity rather than purely technical solutions.