Climate Justice is generally used as a term for viewing climate change as an ethical issue and considering how its causes and effects relate to concepts of justice, particularly social justice and environmental justice. This can mean examining issues such as equality, human rights, collective rights and historical responsibility in relation to climate change. Recognising and addressing the fact that those least responsible for climate change experience its greatest impacts is seen by many as being central to climate justice. The term is also used with reference to legal systems, where justice is achieved through application and development of law in the area of climate change.
Climate justice is a fluid concept, however, there are recurring themes across definitions. The following definitions taken from 'Organizing Cools The Planet' give a picture of the various understandings of climate justice:
Roots in Environmental Justice: “Climate Justice is a vision to dissolve and alleviate the unequal burdens created by climate change. As a form of environmental justice, climate justice is the fair treatment of all people and freedom from discrimination with the creation of policies and projects that address climate change and the systems that create climate change and perpetuate discrimination.”
Amy Goodman (born April 13, 1957) is an American progressive broadcast journalist, syndicated columnist, investigative reporter and author. Goodman is the host of Democracy Now!, an independent global news program broadcast daily on radio, television and the Internet.
Goodman was born in Bay Shore, New York on April 13, 1957 to George, an ophthalmologist, and Dorothy (née Bock) Goodman, and graduated from Bay Shore High School in 1975. She graduated from Radcliffe College in 1984 with a degree in anthropology. She spent a year studying at the College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor, Maine.
Goodman had been news director of Pacifica Radio station WBAI in New York City for over a decade when she co-founded Democracy Now! The War and Peace Report in 1996. Since then, Democracy Now! has been called "probably the most significant progressive news institution that has come around in some time" by professor and media critic Robert McChesney.
In 2001, the show was temporarily pulled off the air, as a result of a conflict with a group of Pacifica Radio board members and Pacifica staff members and listeners. During that time, it moved to a converted firehouse from which it broadcast until November 13, 2009. The new Democracy Now! studio is located in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan.