To celebrate Environmental Justice week, Climate Group's Adam Lake sat down with Mercy Corps CEO Tjada D'Oyen McKenna to discuss how environmental justice impacts their work abroad and why it should be centered across every conversation on the climate crisis.
Read below for some key themes and insights from the conversation:
The interconnected crises of climate change, poverty, and conflict create a vicious cycle that disproportionately impacts the most vulnerable.
Mercy Corps works in communities affected by climate change, poverty and conflict. These crises are mutually reinforcing, creating a vicious cycle where climate change and conflict reinforce each other in really dangerous ways. When droughts or floods destroy resources, people are forced to compete for limited resources like water or land, which can spark or escalate conflict. Ongoing conflict makes it nearly impossible for communities to adapt to climate change.
According to McKenna, the communities that have done the least to contribute to climate change are the ones that are most affected. This impact is starkly illustrated by the drought in Somalia, where 90% of the country was in drought, leading to more than 200,000 people had faced the very real prospect of starvation and children dying of malnutrition while families journeyed for food. There is a critical funding gap, as so much of the funding has gone towards mitigation but not enough in terms of helping people to adapt to these things day-to-day.
Mercy Corps defines environmental justice as shifting power to local communities as leaders and solutions-providers:
Environmental justice is fundamentally all about power and leadership. It means that communities hardest hit by climate change but have done the least to cause it are not seen as victims but as leaders of the solution. These communities must be provided with the funds, tools and resources to access decision-making spaces to shape their own future. It is crucial to absorb indigenous knowledge and that that we place that knowledge and that local leadership as the center of the solution like they are their own heroes. Mercy Corps embodies this by prioritizing bottoms up participatory approaches so the communities develop their own priorities based on local risk and realities and engaging in co-designing solutions to ensure sustainability and long-term adoption by the communities themselves.
We need an urgent and fundamental shift in climate finance and investment to reach fragile regions and support locally-led adaptation.
A critical systemic change required is for climate finance to actually reach fragile and conflict-affected places or just more underserved places in the US. There's a significant disparity, as the more fragile a country or a community is the less climate finance it receives. McKenna notes that private investors are often not equipped to take on that level of risk in unpredictable environments. Bridging that gap will require better public investment and more support from philanthropic actors willing to fund adaptation and resilience efforts where markets can't or simply won't go. Working together to de-risk local markets and back local actors is essential to deliver long-term impact.
Stay tuned for more impactful environmental justice stories throughout the week. Learn more about our Environmental Justice program here.