Mutual Aid x Climate Justice

Even as the Trump administration leads a global right-wing charge to undermine action and funding on climate change, the global climate justice movement continues to organize, pushing against environmental racism and equitable solutions to the climate crisis. At the World Bank’s annual Spring Meetings in Washington, DC last month, climate took a backseat to "safe" topics like private sector job growth, in a nod to the bank’s largest shareholder, the United States, signaling a strategic retreat by global institutions. Yet Black environmental and climate justice organizers continue to demand investment in climate resilience measures like community-controlled energy, food sovereignty, and zero waste systems.

From East Africa to the Americas, mutual aid networks are forging models of resilience that center self-determination. In Uganda and Kenya, trans and queer collectives are breaking free from donor dependency, creating regenerative systems of care in the face of authoritarianism. In the U.S., Black farming cooperatives—hit hard by federal funding freezes—are turning to peer platforms for support, such as a weekly study session and support group on the federal funding freeze facilitated by Land & Liberation which has issued a call for a Mutual Aid & Defense Compact. And despite the Trump administration’s defunding of the Climate Justice Alliance, its Black Caucus was still able to award $170,000 to 11 Black community-based environmental justice organizing efforts across the US.

While the global climate justice movement is facing repeated attacks from the Trump administration, the rapid growth of AI technologies is revealing itself as a new front in the fight against environmental racism. In Memphis, Elon Musk is threatening Black lives, having circumvented environmental regulations to secretly build 35 mobile polluting power plants in order to power an AI-supercomputing facility the size of 13 football fields. Still, the strength of the climate justice movement, like the Black solidarity economy movement, rests in being rooted in communities that have never had the luxury of being able to wait to be saved by their government.