Climate change presents a paradox for moral judgment: its harms are immense and predictable, yet they arise from diffuse collective processes that seem to frustrate attributions of blame. Thus, many believe responsibility can only be coherently understood in forward-looking, structural terms. I argue, however, that a small but powerful group of actors, which I call the “Carbon Axis,” bears responsibility in a thick, backward-looking sense. The standard excuses (e.g., insignificance, ignorance, and lack of intent), which may exculpate some ordinary contributions to harm, afford this group scant moral cover. If anyone is culpable for the climate crisis, the Axis is.

Loss & Damage involves the impacts of climate change that are beyond our ability to adapt. Losses and damages are those relevant impacts. That distinction is less commonly applied to adaptation and mitigation such that the impacts that are “adaptable” are beyond limits to mitigation. This article points out that these conceptual distinctions mean impacts should be indexed to (a) the time of evaluation (what is currently adaptable might not be in the future) and (b) the capacities of the society (abilities to adapt and mitigate are relative to capacities). Implications are drawn about responsibility based on these twin indices.

Climate change is deeply unsettling—both ecologically, as reflected in the rise of climate disasters and biodiversity loss, and materially, as seen in the widespread disruptions and displacements it causes. The impacts of climate change are increasingly experienced as constant and material impact on bodies, and the disruption and displacement of connections to place and entangled environments. This continuous turbulence is creating an experience of being unmoored, disconnected from attachments, both human and environmental. This essay will address both the reality of climate turbulence and the growing intersection of such turbulence and conceptions of environmental, ecological, and climate justice. How and why can the changed, disrupted, turbulent life of climate change, specifically, be understood as a unique form of climate injustice? A variety of conceptions of climate justice are addressed, with a particular focus on the way that climate turbulence unsettles individual and community capabilities and functioning in multiple ways. The essay addresses how a more just response to climate turbulence means more inclusive and capabilities-based approaches to climate justice.

This article identifies and analyzes a select body of climate litigation, framing such litigation as a decolonial approach to legal mobilization. Drawing on 58 cases filed between 2003 and 2023, we examine how certain climate lawsuits – spanning diverse jurisdictions, legal claims, and forums – articulate political projects grounded in historical struggles against colonialism, racial capitalism, and extractivism. Instead of adopting conventional typologies based on rights, torts or procedural elements, we propose a political lens attentive to the subaltern voices, contexts, and narratives that animate these cases. We identify commonalities across this litigation: racialized plaintiffs, three contexts of decolonial struggle (settler colonies, metropoles/(post)colonies, and global peripheries), and four distinctive types of decolonial claim. While these cases remain partially entangled with liberal legal frameworks, they nonetheless contest dominant climate governance paradigms and advance emancipatory visions of justice. We argue that these cases represent a tactical, albeit imperfect, intervention in the struggle for decolonial climate justice.

Art-making has long been a feature of education and is increasingly being engaged to challenge normative perspectives in environmental education. This collaborative piece reflects on a creative pedagogy of zine-making for climate justice education based on the experiences of a zine/arts-making workshop held on Bundjalung Nation Country (so-called Kingscliff, Australia) for the annual retreat of The Sustainability, Environment, and the Arts in Education Research Centre. Members attended the workshop and collectively created a “zine” on the day. From a myriad of transdisciplinary spaces in education, the workshop was inspired by collective concerns and political commitments to climate justice education. Working in the space of de/anti-colonial and ecofeminist education, facilitators opened a space to understand, collage and create manifestos, stories, poems, and art on climate justice through zine-making. Based on collective reflection and writing together, this article contextualises and describes a pedagogical approach for climate justice education through zine-making. Artfully it exhibits our collectively created zine intermingled with reflective responses regarding the possibilities and challenges of zine-making as pedagogy for climate justice education. We recommend zine-making be put to work as a playful and creative pedagogy of generative rebellion toward climate justice with care.

L’attente passive d’une intervention législative en matière d’emploi qui répondra prodigieusement aux enjeux de la crise climatique est délétère. Les fondements du droit du travail révèlent que ce sont les luttes sociales, la solidarité ouvrière et une prise de conscience sociétale à l’égard des dérives et des risques de l’industrialisation sur la personne humaine qui ont alimenté sa densité normative et les différentes strates de lois spécifiques qui le composent aujourd’hui. Pourtant, la crise climatique se présente comme une conséquence évidente du phénomène de l’industrialisation. C’est par un retour sur les mécanismes et les déclencheurs sociaux de la fabrication du droit du travail que se profile sa capacité de répondre aux risques climatiques en emploi ainsi qu’aux conséquences découlant des changements climatiques pour les personnes salariées. L’interface des droits de la personne concourrait également à combler les interstices de la législation du travail face aux défis contemporains posés par la crise climatique.

This article presents an ethnographic study of the case of Ende Gelände (EG), a German civil disobedience network undertaking action for climate justice. We reveal how a politics of legitimacy in civil society organizations such as EG are structured and constructed through different styles of civic action. Specifically, in our case study, a dominant pattern of “civil anarchizing” (CA) emerged, in which legitimacy was continuously negotiated in relation to both external and internal stakeholders. This CA style was also accompanied by a more individual-centered style that we call personalized politics. We compare both styles and describe the tensions that result from their co-occurrence. In addition, we argue that the CA style might be more viable for politicization due to its emphasis on a collective strategy. Finally, we describe how this CA style shaped the participants’ politics of legitimacy by functioning as a negotiated hybrid of civil and uncivil expectations.

Multiple interrelated global crises challenge political thinkers and activists to engage with temporality. Taking the diagnosis of already unfolding planetary environmental catastrophe seriously, climate activists and environmental scholars in the Global North have increasingly focused on experiences of irredeemable loss. These “postapocalyptic” discourses draw on Indigenous, decolonial, and feminist engagements with temporality to highlight the interconnections between different temporal scales, speeds, and rhythms in the Anthropocene. Moreover, the notion of the postapocalyptic present offers an analytical link between historical narratives about the development of extractive capitalism and social “lived” temporalities of mourning, care, and disruption. Feminist debates about the limits and possibilities of social (care-) strikes here provide important insights about the need to interrupt dominant temporal regimes defined by an incessant drive for heightened economic productivity. Disruptive and prefigurative political practices can in turn create room for experimentation with more sustainable and caring forms of societal organization in a diminished present.

In this paper, we explore the challenges and possibilities of environmental teacher education in the unravelling of a metacrisis. Drawing from multiple perspectives from post-growth literature, environmental sciences, political ecology and philosophy of education, we argue for the need to navigate complex environmental issues through simple yet profound narratives, what we term simplexity. As environmental educators working in the Pacific Northwest, we reflect on our distinct positionalities to propose five pedagogical touchstones that bridge the gap between overwhelming complexity and oversimplification in teacher education. These touchstones include: (1) challenging nature – culture divides and acknowledging alternative ontologies, (2) countering pessimistic views while fostering post-growth imaginaries, (3) confronting the Great Acceleration and ecological overshoot, (4) recognising power dynamics and colonial legacies in metropolis-periphery relations and (5) engaging with the aesthetic and embodied dimensions of climate disasters. Our framework seeks to propose pedagogical openings for teacher educators to cultivate agency and critical hope in environmental teacher education.

Martuwarra the Fitzroy River, is a living entity encompassing law, values, ethics and virtues who has laid the foundation for learning and self-regulation. Martuwarra foster peace, harmony and balance within a water system covering 93,829 square kilometres of the Western Australian Kimberley region. However, climate uncertainty as part of the unfolding metacrisis demonstrates the limitations of decades of colonial invasive development in the Kimberley. In this paper the authors illustrate Traditional Owner water knowledge, science and lived experiences as managers of the catchment from the beginning of time. Traditional Owner knowledge and practices, fine-tuned over thousands of years, carry water governance and management through First Law, the law of the land and not man. The authors advocate for this ancient knowledge to be learned by fellow citizens in the region, governments, industries and other parts of Australia, as it is essential to modernity. They propose a bicultural and bioregional governance model to create a better future for the greater good of all.

Transnational climate litigation has become a strategic tool to press state and non-state actors into action. An analysis of international and domestic cases shows how rights and obligations are being materially, subjectively, spatially and temporally stretched in judicial proceedings. This article focuses on three distinct grammars of climate justice activated in climate litigation. The analysis exposes a shift from a traditional to a progressive grammar that moves from actual to potential climate harms, from human to nonhuman rights, from territorial to extra-territorial obligations, and from present to future generations. Beyond a traditional liberal framing of rights-based approaches to climate justice, we witness here a progressive critical grammar that broadens the scope of who can be considered legally affected by climate change, where, and how. A more radical understanding of climate justice, however, exceeds the capacity of these registers to confer structure, order, and meaning to climate harms across matter, subjects, space and time. Against this backdrop, a reparative grammar of climate justice is envisioned, which reconfigures the material boundary from potential to entangled harms, the subjective boundary from nonhuman victims to more-than-human care, the spatial boundary from extra-territorial to terrestrial spatiality, and the temporal boundary from future to enduring temporalities. In doing so, the analysis opens up a register of political thought for climate justice that starts in the law yet vastly exceeds and disrupts it.

This article interrogates the concept of ‘polycrisis’ through a decolonial, Global South-centered lens, arguing that current polycrisis discourse inadequately addresses entrenched global inequalities and power asymmetries. It contends that the convergence of crises – ecological, economic, social, and political – is not a novel universal condition but a structural feature of neoliberal global capitalism, long experienced in the Global South. The paper conceptualizes the polycrisis as an organic crisis of hegemonic neoliberalism and imperial modernity. It foregrounds Global South epistemologies and counter-hegemonic responses to demonstrate how subaltern actors are theorizing and contesting global crises. Methodologically, it adopts an interdisciplinary, interpretive approach that privileges Southern knowledge production. The paper finally advocates for a post-neoliberal approach that center around equality, sustianability and justice to navigate the polycrisis.