Children run through an open fire hydrant to cool off during the kickoff of the 2016 Summer Playstreets Program in the Harlem neighborhood of New York, July, 6, 2016.
AP Photo/Ezra Kaplan
Climate change is making heat waves more frequent and intense around the world. Cities are hotter than surrounding areas, so urban dwellers – especially minorities and the poor – are at greatest risk.
Demonstrators at a rally in Frankfort, Kentucky, Feb. 13, 2013, protest against mountaintop removal coal mining.
AP Photo/James Crisp
Are all people entitled to live in a clean and healthy environment? A legal scholar says yes, and argues for using this principle to address damage from polluting industries in Appalachia.
Abandoned industrial buildings at San Francisco’s Pier 70, with a smokestack in the background.
Lindsey Dillon
Cleaning up and reusing contaminated sites, known as brownfields, can create jobs and promote economic growth. But it also can drive gentrification that prices out low-income residents.
Hog feeding operation near Tribune, Kansas.
AP Photo/Charlie Riedel
Large livestock farms, known as CAFOs, have polluted air and water in many communities. A recent court decision will force CAFOs to report their air emissions from manure and other sources.
Most U.S. environmental organizations are less diverse than this group of Californian environmental justice leaders.
Brooke Anderson/CEJA
How could green groups attract more diverse volunteers? Maybe they could put more time and energy into outreach toward the people most affected by environmental injustices.
The Flint water crisis was one of the few cases of environment-related social injustices that reached national attention in recent years.
AP Photo/Andrew Harnik
Addressing social and health inequalities from pollution is no longer a priority at the EPA. What did the Office of Environmental Justice do and what will happen if it’s shut down?
Activists, federal workers and union representatives rallied for environmental protection policies at the EPA.
American Federation of Government Employees
The EPA served as a conduit between the federal government and at-risk communities. Communications scholars look at how environmental justice issues could be set back in scaled-down EPA.
In December, protesters in Standing Rock, North Dakota scored a big victory against a pipeline builder, yet the underlying problems have not been addressed.
AP Photo/David Goldman
A Native American scholar explains why so little has changed despite the apparent victory of protesters opposing the North Dakota Access Pipeline protest.
A five-story coal ash pile next to the AES electric power plant in Guayama, Puerto Rico.
Hilda Llorens
Low-income residents in Puerto Rico are fighting disposal of toxic coal ash in their communities. They’re also campaigning to shift from coal energy – the source of the problem – to solar power.
The incoming EPA will likely lean toward less oversight over state public health programs – and lax enforcement is one of the causes behind the Flint water crisis.
Rebecca Cook/Reuters
The hostility of Scott Pruitt, Trump’s nominee to head the EPA, toward climate change rules is well-known. But his anti-regulatory stance could easily set back years of work on environmental justice.
Stacks at the Nucor Steel plant – one of the types of manufacturing sites that would be affected by a carbon tax – in front of the Space Needle in Seattle.
AP Photo/Elaine Thompson
Washington state’s plan to create a carbon tax would make it a climate leader, but local environmental groups are fighting it. What gives?
Members of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe protest construction of an oil pipeline near their reservation in Cannon Ball, North Dakota.
Andrew Cullen/Reuters
What is the months-long North Dakota Access Pipeline protest really about? A Native American scholar connects the dots to environmental justice and the legacy of U.S. colonialism.
Residents of Flint, Michigan wait at a congressional hearing in Washington, D.C. on the water crisis.
Kevin Lamarque/Reuters
Hillary Clinton has elevated environmental justice to a high level as a presidential nominee, but as the Flint water crisis demonstrates, the deeper problem lies in ineffective government agencies.
If sea level rise takes away someone’s land, should that country be compensated and how?
dfataustralianaid/flickr
Wil Burns, American University School of International Service
Despite the fanfare of signing the Paris Agreement on climate, little progress has been made on compensating poor countries for irreparable damages from climate change.
The hidden costs of affordable housing in the outer suburbs include poorer access to services and long hours of commuting.
AAP/David Crosling
Australian cities should be made to work for all inhabitants. This involves evenly spreading the disadvantages of industrial and commercial activities as well as the advantages of good access to services.
Flint, Michigan residents couldn’t get answers about their water – so they did their own research.
Laura Nawrocik
A new model of citizen-led science is emerging – as in the case of Flint, Michigan’s poisoned water. Rather than simply supporting scientists, citizens ask their own questions and set the research agenda.
Tap water in Flint’s hospital on October 16.
Joyca Zhu/Flint Water Study
If Flint, Michigan were an affluent suburb, would residents have been exposed as long to drinking toxic water? Pioneering scholar Robert Bullard calls Flint’s crisis a classic case of environmental discrimination
Severe floods in Chennai. How should developing countries hold richer countries to financial commitments to adapt to climate change?
Anindito Mukherjee/Reuters
How to ensure rich countries will live up to their promises of money and carbon emissions cuts? Developing countries need to look to the Allies’ unified strategy in World War II.
Ahead of the Paris climate summit, protesters in the Philippines march for climate justice.
Erik de Castro/Reuters
A narrow debate of what countries should pay to respond to climate change obscures a bigger moral discussion that touches on economics, ethics and people’s relationship to the natural world.
South Africa is heavily dependent on burning coal to generate electricity.
Jon Hrusa/EPA
Environmental racism remains a reality in South Africa. It is poor, black citizens who live on the most damaged land and in the most polluted neighbourhoods.