Location: Berkeley, CA
Region: United States
Founding: 2013
Founders/leadership: Ozawa Bineshi Alber, co-executive director; Monica Atkins, co-executive director; Marion Gee, co-excecutive director

 

The Climate Justice Alliance (CJA) is rooted in the cultural wisdom of Indigenous, African American, Latino, Asian/Pacific Islander, and working-class white communities throughout the United States. CJA unites frontline communities and organizations into a formidable force by applying the power of deep grassroots organizing to win local, regional, statewide, and national battles that work toward building a Just Transition. With decades of frontline wisdom and organizing, CJA members made local versions of the Green New Deal from New York City to Oregon, centering traditional ecological and cultural knowledge and creating pathways for a regenerative future. 

Formed in 2013, CJA emerged from a three-year process of grassroots groups and movement support organizations in the racial, environmental, and economic justice spaces working together for global climate justice. With the goal of aiding more than 100 million people, many living near toxic, climate polluting energy infrastructure, CJA centers racially oppressed and low-income communities — those who have suffered disproportionately from the impacts of pollution — through organizing, mass direct action, electoral work, cultural revival, and policy advocacy.  

CJA milestones include convening a climate justice assembly at the 2nd United States Social Forum in Detroit (2010) attended by 400 people representing over 118 organizations; sending movement delegations to the recent UN climate accord conferences (Copenhagen in 2010, Cancun in 2011, Durban in 2012); participating in the climate summit in Bolivia, which produced the Cochabamba Protocol; and the UN Rio+20 Earth Summit (2012). Most notably, the CJA joined 64 other organizations in 2019 for the Frontline Green New Deal Climate and Regenerative Economic Policy Summit. CJA Policy Fellow Kari Fulutron was a speaker along with Senator Bernie Sanders, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and climate and housing advocates.