We ask that researchers and other practitioners working with the CCJ agree to work in alignment with the following principles:
- Climate change is the result of colonial and extractive ideologies with racial, gender, and class hierarchies at their core. Climate change is also experienced highly unevenly, with the most severe impacts often falling on those who have least contributed to the crisis. For these reasons, efforts to address climate change have the potential to alleviate or exacerbate existing inequities and injustices, and a climate justice perspective is relevant to climate responses at all scales.
- Perspectives on climate justice vary, and may not always be in agreement. We commit to engaging respectfully and transparently with our research partners to identify shared goals and values, and to forge collaborations based on principles of solidarity and accountability.
- Climate justice requires diverse forms of knowledge and expertise, including many not traditionally represented in the academy.
- Climate justice scholarship must be non-extractive. This requires that community-engaged research be guided by and accountable to community partners, with care taken to cultivate ethical relationships and culturally-appropriate processes of accountability and transparency. Theory and concepts from knowledge traditions that are under-represented in academic scholarship must also be engaged in respectful, culturally-appropriate, and non-extractive ways.
- The Centre for Climate Justice is committed to cultivating right relation with the Indigenous peoples on whose ancestral and unceded lands our work is situated, including the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish) and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations, and the nsyilxcən speaking Syilx Okanagan Nation and their peoples. We are committed to the ongoing accountabilities involved in building our respectful, reciprocal relationships with these Nations, and to ensuring that our actions and principles align with Nations’ laws, priorities, and self-determination.