California dreaming: Why environmental justice is integral to the success of climate change policy.

In the realm of climate policy, issues of environmental justice (EJ) are often treated as second-order affairs compared to overarching sustainability goals. We argue that EJ is in fact critical to successfully addressing our national and global climate challenges; indeed, centering equity amplifies the voices of the diverse constituencies most impacted by climate change and that are needed to build successful coalitions that shape and advance climate change policy. We illustrate this perspective by highlighting the experience of California and the contentious processes by which EJ became integrated into the state's climate action efforts. We examine the achievements and shortcomings of California's commitment to climate justice and discuss how lessons from the Golden State are influencing the evolution of current federal climate change policy.

Modeling and design of solar + storage-powered community resilience hubs across California.

Distributed clean, reliable energy resources like solar plus battery storage (solar + storage) can reduce harmful emissions while supporting resilience. Solar + storage-powered resilience hubs provide energy for critical services during disasters while increasing human adaptive capacity year round. We studied where utility rates, local climate, and historical injustice make solar + storage resilience hubs more valuable and more challenging. We modeled the economic and climate impacts of outfitting candidate hub sites across California with solar + storage for everyday operations and identified designs and costs required to withstand a range of outages considering weather impacts on energy needs and availability. We integrated sociodemographic data to prioritize the siting of resilience hubs, to focus potential policy and funding priorities on regions where solar + storage for resilience hubs is hard or expensive, and where populations are most in need. We identified almost 20,000 candidate buildings with more than 8 GW of total rooftop solar potential capable of reducing CO2 emissions by 5 million tons per year while providing energy for community resilience. Hub capacity for one of the most challenging missions-providing emergency shelter during a power outage and smoke event-could have a statewide average lifetime cost of less than $2000 per seat. We identified regional challenges including insufficient rooftop solar capacity in cities, low sunlight in northern coastal California, and high costs driven by utility rate structures in Sacramento and the Imperial Valley. Results show that rates and net metering rules that incentivize solar + storage during everyday operations decrease resilience costs.

Just-relations and responsibility for planetary health: The global nurse agenda for climate justice.

There is an urgent call for nurses to address climate change, especially in advocating for those most under threat to the impacts. Social justice is important to nurses in their relations with individuals and populations, including actions to address climate justice. The purpose of this article is to present a Global Nurse Agenda for Climate Justice to spark dialog, provide direction, and to promote nursing action for just-relations and responsibility for planetary health. Grounding ourselves within the Mi'kmaw concept of Etuaptmumk (two-eyed seeing), we suggest that climate justice is both call and response, moving nurses from silence to Ksaltultinej (love as action). We review the movement for climate justice in nursing, weaving between our own stories, our relations with Mi'kmaw ways of knowing, and the stories of the movement, with considerations for the (w)holistic perspectives foundational to nursing's metaparadigm of person, environment, and health. We provide a background to the work of the Global Nurse Agenda for Climate Justice steering committee including their role at the 26th United Nations Climate Change Conference in Glasgow, 2021, and share our own stories of action to frame this agenda. We accept our Responsibility for the challenges of climate justice with humility and invite others to join us.

Actors, legitimacy, and governance challenges facing negative emissions and solar geoengineering technologies.

Institutional theory, behavioral science, sociology and even political science all emphasize the importance of actors in achieving social change. Despite this salience, the actors involved in researching, promoting, or deploying negative emissions and solar geoengineering technologies remain underexplored within the literature. In this study, based on a rigorous sample of semi-structured expert interviews (N = 125), we empirically explore the types of actors and groups associated with both negative emissions and solar geoengineering research and deployment. We investigate emergent knowledge networks and patterns of involvement across space and scale. We examine actors in terms of their support of, opposition to, or ambiguity regarding both types of climate interventions. We reveal incipient and perhaps unforeseen collections of actors; determine which sorts of actors are associated with different technology pathways to comprehend the locations of actor groups and potential patterns of elitism; and assess relative degrees of social acceptance, legitimacy, and governance.

Embedding telehealth for sustainable health services linking Oceania.

The expansion of telehealth during the COVID-19 pandemic can be further adapted and extended to align with principles of climate justice. We argue that high-emission countries with well-developed medical systems, like Australia, should support communities disproportionately impacted by climate change who request assistance, like in small island states of Oceania. Linking health services in small island states with neighbouring countries' medical systems can support sustainability, if such reconfigurations are appropriately resourced and accessibility is prioritized. Investments in telehealth, particularly reconfiguring services through community-led linkages with larger medical systems, supports the sustainable development goal of universal access to healthcare.

Australian young people's perceptions of the commercial determinants of the climate crisis.

There is increasing public health focus on how corporate practices impact population health and well-being. While the commercial determinants of the climate crisis pose serious threats to human and planetary health, governments largely seek to balance climate action with economic imperatives. Global stakeholders recognize that young people have important voices in influencing climate responses. However, few studies have investigated young people's perceptions of the commercial determinants of the climate crisis. A qualitatively led online survey of n = 500 young Australians (15-24 years) investigated their understanding of corporate responses to the climate crisis, factors that influenced these responses and strategies to respond. A reflexive approach to thematic analysis was used. Three themes were constructed from the data. First, young people perceived that corporate responses to the climate crisis focussed on soft options and lacked meaningful action. Second, they stated that these responses were largely influenced by economic imperatives rather than planetary health, with policy levers needed to implement environmentally responsible corporate practices. Third, young people perceived that systems needed change to create demand for a cleaner environment, leading to improved practices. Young people have a clear understanding of the commercial determinants of the climate crisis and associated threats to population health. They recognize that corporate practices (and consumer demand) will not change without significant policy and structural change. Public health and health promotion stakeholders should work alongside young people to influence decision-makers to address harmful corporate behaviours.

The political economy of net-zero transitions: Policy drivers, barriers, and justice benefits to decarbonization in eight carbon-neutral countries.

This study examines the political economy of decarbonization in eight countries over the period 2000 to 2021/2022 that have already achieved a national net-zero transition. These countries are Bhutan, Suriname, Panama, Guyana, Comoros, Gabon, Madagascar, and Niue. It utilizes an analytical method of a rich, interdisciplinary and systematized literature review integrated with thematic analysis. For each of these countries, the study examines the drivers and political motivation behind net-zero progress, including the timeline of events; the barriers and challenges that had to be overcome; and the benefits of decarbonization and its impacts on equity and justice. The main objectives of the study are to broaden the evidence base on low-carbon transitions beyond often and even overstudied countries that are Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democracies, or WEIRD countries, and to offer new empirical data on the strategy of energy policies in the real world, examining the first eight countries to achieve net-zero success in the modern era. It finds that all eight countries used a similar mix of nine policy interventions involving land use, renewable energy, and waste management. Common barriers included vulnerability to the effects of extreme climate events either in the form of natural disasters (i.e. landslides and floodings) or ecosystems degradation (i.e. ocean acidification, coastal erosion and forests loss). Despite these barriers, achieving net-zero emissions positively impacted marginalized communities by providing a more equitable distribution of climate benefits, mitigating adverse health effects and reducing social inequalities, particularly in low-income areas.

Climate Justice Is Environmental Justice: System Change for Promoting Planetary Health and a Just Transition From Extractive to Regenerative Action.

Our climate emergency is changing health promotion practice, and we need to increase our efforts. In the 20 years since our journal was published, we have witnessed the pressing challenges incurred by human-caused threats to planetary health. These threats are most profound in communities that are already unjustly under threat from structural factors such as poverty, toxic exposures, and inequitable allocation of resources for promoting their health. Those least responsible for contributing to this emergency, including all living environments in harm's way, will unjustly experience the greatest burdens. This commentary calls for health promotion practice to engage in system change and action in the struggle for climate justice by adopting a planetary health perspective. There must be a just transition from extractive to regenerative economies and actions. We describe our own journey as researchers and health practitioners toward this call for action. We propose a series of system change actions in social, environmental, political, health systems, and health profession education within the scope and responsibility of health promotion practice.

Backward-Looking Principles of Climate Justice: The Unjustified Move from the Polluter Pays Principle to the Beneficiary Pays Principle.

Climate change involves changes in the climate system caused by polluting human activities and the social and natural effects of these changes. The historical and anthropogenic grounds of climate change play an important role in climate justice claims. Many climate justice scholars believe that principles of climate justice should account for the historical and anthropogenic sources of climate change. Two main backward-looking principles have been proposed: the polluter pays principle (PPP) and the beneficiary pays principle (BPP). The BPP emerged in the literature on climate justice in response to certain objections raised against the PPP. In this paper, I focus on two of these objections: the causation objection and the excusable ignorance objection. Defenders of the BPP have traditionally assumed that this principle is not vulnerable to those objections, which renders the BPP superior to the PPP. In this paper, I challenge this underlying assumption. My argument here is simple: moving from the PPP to the BPP in response to any of these objections might be unjustified because the BPP is affected by at least some of the considerations giving rise to these objections.

Environmentally sustainable practices in global health research and higher education institutions: Lessons from consultation with the TropEd Global Health institutions.

OBJECTIVE: To examine how global health institutions are reducing the greenhouse gas emissions from their own operations and analyse the facilitators and barriers to achieving decarbonisation goals. METHODS: We reviewed the sustainability goals and implementation plans of 10 global health universities from the 'TropEd' network. We systematically collected information from institutional websites and annual reports. Through online interviews, 11 key informants validated the information from 9 of the institutions and shared their opinions regarding what factors are helping their institutions decarbonise and what factors are hindering progress. RESULTS: 4/10 institutions sampled have a sustainability strategy and implementation plan, only 3/10 have specific decarbonisation goals, and 3/10 are reporting on progress. 5/10 institutions reported that they are in the process of determining emission reduction targets. CONCLUSION: This paper identifies common success factors that facilitate decarbonisation as well as common challenges and how they are being tackled, and makes recommendations on sustainability efforts in academic institutions.

Flexible Bayesian Ensemble Machine Learning Framework for Predicting Local Ozone Concentrations.

3D-grid-based chemical transport models, such as the Community Multiscale Air Quality (CMAQ) modeling system, have been widely used for predicting concentrations of ambient air pollutants. However, typical horizontal resolutions of nationwide CMAQ simulations (12 × 12 km2) cannot capture local-scale gradients for accurately assessing human exposures and environmental justice disparities. In this study, a Bayesian ensemble machine learning (BEML) framework, which integrates 13 learning algorithms, was developed for downscaling CMAQ estimates of ozone daily maximum 8 h averages to the census tract level, across the contiguous US, and was demonstrated for 2011. Three-stage hyperparameter tuning and targeted validations were designed to ensure the ensemble model's ability to interpolate, extrapolate, and capture concentration peaks. The Shapley value metric from coalitional game theory was applied to interpret the drivers of subgrid gradients. The flexibility (transferability) of the 2011-trained BEML model was further tested by evaluating its ability to estimate fine-scale concentrations for other years (2012-2017) without retraining. To demonstrate the feasibility of using the BEML approach to strictly "data-limited" situations, the model was applied to downscale CMAQ outputs for a future-year scenario-based simulation that considers effects of variations in meteorology associated with climate change.

The Curious Relationship Between COVID-19 Lockdowns and Urban Heat Islands.

The COVID-19 pandemic has been a life-altering shock to society. However, there have been serendipitous outcomes from the associated lockdowns ranging from improved air quality to reductions in carbon emissions. Liu et al. (2022, https://doi.org/10.1029/2021GL096842) revealed that even the magnitude of the heat islands in Chinese cities were reduced due to a decline in human activities and their associated anthropogenic contributions. These surprising findings have significant implications for understanding intersections among climate, health, energy, urban planning, transportation, and infrastructure.

Prioritizing adaptation and mitigation in the climate movement: evidence from a cross-national protest survey of the Global Climate Strike, 2019.

Climate adaptation is seen by many as increasingly important and as deeply political, leading some to argue for its democratization. Social movements could play an important role in this. Meanwhile, we have recently witnessed a major swell in climate activism, as well as a growing realization among climate activists that it may be too late to prevent major climate disruptions. Yet to what extent this may lead to a focus on adaptation in the climate movement remains understudied. To address this gap in the literature, the current paper draws on survey data from 2,344 participants in Fridays For Future climate demonstrations in September 2019 in 13 cities in Europe, Australia and the USA. The analyses show that while one-half of the respondents still attributes greater weight to mitigation, the other half attributes equal weight to adaptation and mitigation, indicating a greater emphasis on adaptation than previously assumed. It is found that those supporting (equal focus on) adaptation experience less hope about the effectiveness of climate policies, and portray a reluctance to support far-reaching climate action. The latter indicates that support for adaptation in the climate movement is associated with conservative attitudes, indicating constraints for the emergence of a climate movement for transformational adaptation.

Institutional panarchy: Adaptations in socio-hydrological governance of the South Dakota Prairie Pothole Region, USA.

This study develops and applies the Institutional Panarchy Framework (IPF) to examine institutional adaptations in the rights, rules, and authority to govern public access and use of 'nonmeandered waters' (NMWs) overlying private lands in the South Dakota Prairie Pothole Region (SD PPR). Data collection from March 2017 through July 2019 involved field observations of legislative and other public meetings and review of legislation, policy, court cases, documents, and existing statistics. Findings demonstrated how hydrological changes resulted in everyday, operational level changes in how access and use rights to NMWs were executed, conflict over rules governing use and access of NMWs at the collective choice level, and eventually constitutional level changes in the authority to determine rights and rules of access and use of NMWs. A key contribution for commons and socio-hydrological governance scholarship is that institutional resistance and pressures for change are not unidirectional; feedbacks from lower institutional levels spur change at higher levels and broader scales. Broader policy implications include institutional mechanisms for potential improvements in water quality, farm sustainability, and climate justice.

Nursing strategies for environmental justice: A scoping review.

OBJECTIVE: To describe types of strategic actions nurses take to promote environmental justice (EJ) through research, education, advocacy, and practice (REAP) reported in peer-reviewed literature. DESIGN AND SAMPLE: A scoping review of literature was conducted that described EJ nursing strategies and included nurses listed as authors, subjects, partners, or organizational members. The sample consisted of 35 articles, representing 24 primary research studies and 11 nonresearch articles. Data were separately analyzed by research and nonresearch articles for a clearer understanding of evidence-based strategies within domains of REAP. RESULTS: Articles in the sample highlighted the importance of authentic community partnership and represented diversity of nursing strategies that addressed a range of environmental exposures and subsequent health and racial inequities. Climate justice, a concept that emerged from the EJ movement and intersects with planetary health, is a recent focus in professional nursing. CONCLUSIONS: This scoping review establishes an understanding of the extent of nursing knowledge and research in EJ and lays the groundwork for further research on effective EJ nursing strategies. Community-Based Participatory Research/Participatory Action Research methods are fundamental for EJ research, and further theoretical development is needed to guide evaluation of EJ nursing strategies for education, advocacy, and practice.

Why and Where to Fund Carbon Capture and Storage.

This paper puts forward two claims about funding carbon capture and storage. The first claim is that there are moral justifications supporting strategic investment into CO2 storage from global and regional perspectives. One argument draws on the empirical evidence which suggests carbon capture and storage would play a significant role in a portfolio of global solutions to climate change; the other draws on Rawls' notion of legitimate expectations and Moellendorf's Anti-Poverty principle. The second claim is that where to pursue this strategic investment poses a morally non-trivial problem, with considerations like near-term global distributive justice and undermining legitimate expectations favouring investing in developing regions, especially in Asia, and considerations like long-term climate impacts and best uses of resources favouring investing in the relatively wealthy regions that have the best prospects for successful storage development.

Climate Change and Population Health: Incorporating Stages of Nursing's Political Development.

Climate change is the greatest public health threat of the 21st century and is associated with environmental degradation and deleterious health consequences. In 2019, the Lancet Commission Report on Health and Climate Change: Ensuring that the Health of a Child Born Today Is Not Defined By a Changing Climate (Watts et al., 2019) examined the critical health issues that children will face in the era of climate change. Greenhouse gas emissions (GGEs) are responsible for an alarming increase in the warming of the planet, shifts in weather patterns, loss of arable land, and exacerbations of acute health issues, chronic health problems, and disaster-related health consequences. The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of climate change and the associated deleterious health consequences in our climate-changing world. The paper will also examine the stages of political development to advance the 21st century role of the nursing profession in climate and health advocacy and policy.

Nursing's mandate in climate change.

Science tells us that human-induced climate change is real and threatening health and well-being everywhere. Nurses have a key role as individuals and collectively to mitigate these effects. We are obligated to action, advocacy, and policy change at both a personal and professional level in this global emergency. This includes working to achieve climate justice and the United Nations' Sustainable Health Goals, which have a strong focus on climate action.

Climate injustice, criminalisation of land protection and anti-colonial solidarity: Courtroom ethnography in an age of fossil fuel violence.

As plans for expanding fossil fuel infrastructure continue to ramp up despite threats to the planet, how are geographers to address the criminalisation and prosecution of peaceful acts of defending earth, water and land? Reflecting on a courtroom ethnography and debates spanning legal geography, political ecology and social movements studies, this article explores embodied struggles around oil, 'justice' and geographies of caring - discussing how Indigenous youth, grandmothers in their eighties and others were convicted of 'criminal contempt' for being on a road near an oil pipeline expansion project. The project ("Trans Mountain Pipeline Expansion") was created to transport unprecedented levels of heavy oil (bitumen) across hundreds of kilometres of Indigenous peoples' territory that was never ceded to settler-colonial authorities in Canada. Focusing on a controversial injunction designed to protect oil industry expansion, the discussion explores the performativity of a judge's exercise of power, including in denying the necessity to act defence, side-lining Indigenous jurisdiction, and escalating prison sentences. Courtroom ethnography offers a unique vantage point for witnessing power at work and vast resources used by state actors to suppress issues fundamental to the United Nations Declaration on Rights of Indigenous Peoples and the Paris Climate Accord. It also provides a lens into the intersectional solidarity and ethics of care among those who dare to challenge colonialism and hyper-extractivism, inviting engagement with multiple meanings of 'irreparable harm' at various scales. The article calls for more attention to power relations, values and affects shaping courtroom dynamics in an age in which fossil fuel interests, climate crisis and settler-colonial control over courts are entwined in evermore-complex violent entanglements.

A Moment of Intersecting Crises: Climate Justice in the Era of Coronavirus.

The author explores the nexus of 'climate chaos' and how this intersects with and exacerbates the top issues of our time-from immigration to public health to mass incarceration. She challenges us to think about the implications of these intersections for social justice and why policy makers need to stop considering the climate emergency as a siloed issue. Climate policy needs to be framed and rethought in an intersectional manner that centers equity, justice, and the creation of jobs.