The most recent report on environmental impacts, adaptations, and vulnerabilities from the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, released in February, is “a further code red warning for humanity,” according to UN Secretary-General António Guterres. (Further code red: homo sapiens aren’t looking all that sapient right now.) The failures so far, either to meet greenhouse-gas-reduction targets or to adapt to predicted climate impacts, have left more than 3.3 billion people—that’s about half of the world’s population—“highly vulnerable” to floods, drought, heat, food shortages, wildfires, and associated economic and social strife. And because the climate crisis is a force multiplier that compounds pre-existing vulnerabilities, these impacts are not evenly distributed: as with Covid, the people who are already disadvantaged will continue to be the hardest hit.
The link between climate impacts and social inequities is what climate justice is about, and it’s a link that’s especially strong in the built environment. “Almost anywhere we look, the places architects practice have histories of injustice. We are literally building on these sites,” says Kian Goh, an associate professor of urban planning at UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs and a faculty director of the school’s Institute on Inequality and Democracy. “A core part of our practice is to be accountable to the fact that these are not neutral places.”
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