We are a vibrant network that raises awareness for issues of environmental justice and strengthens the democratic participation of those affected by environmental problems. We connect actors from research, policy and planning, and civil society. We believe that research should address real, pressing challenges and be undertaken in cooperation with partners and stakeholders. We create analogue and digital spaces of communication and initiate collaborative research.

Mission statement

The deteriorating climate and multiple environmental crises affect different demographic groups in diverse ways, creating poor health outcomes and poverty traps for billions. In many places, low-income tenants who live in the vicinity of busy roads are exposed to significantly higher emissions than the rest of the local population. All over the world, students and their parents are taking to the streets in order to demand effective measures against climate change, arguing for intergenerational and climate justice. In France, on the other hand, tens of thousands of people are protesting against the introduction of carbon taxes. And at a Regional Court in Germany, a Peruvian smallholder is suing the energy group RWE for threatening his livelihood with all the CO2 emitted by the company in Germany. These examples show how environmental and climate crises have become part of our everyday lives. They raise new questions of distribution and justice that are not easy to answer and that need to be discussed with broad participation of societal actors. This is because the roadmap to more desirable futures for the many (not the few) questions everyone’s ways of life and the predominant models of development, and fundamentally challenges the existing power dynamics controlled by the few.

The aim of the EnJust-Network is to promote exchange between research, politics, economy and civil society. The current transformation compels us to listen to and learn from each other. Environmental and climate justice issues are complex. Therefore, we believe it is necessary to be attentive to different perspectives and to build on these insights, looking for common ground and justice in our interpretations. Since there are only a few formats that promote inter- and transdisciplinary exchange on environmental and climate justice, we have decided to help close this gap. This platform therefore provides new impulses for diverse collaborations between science and practice and supports joint transdisciplinary research that promotes real change in the real world.

Specifically, the EnJust-network wants to encourage innovative research, multi-stakeholder dialogue and effective action on the following questions of environmental and climate justice:

• Who or what is experiencing new or exacerbated forms of injustice as
  a result of rapid climate and/or environmental change?
• Which policies and social and economic processes at which scales
  can contribute to more just ways of sharing the burden of climate
  and environmental change?
• What are innovative ways of communicating about environmental
  injustice and justice-based responses to climate and
  environmental crises?

Science and activism

Within the EnJust network, we constantly discuss questions about the role of science in relation to activism, alternative knowledge systems and decolonial thinking in the context of environmental justice. There is a wide range of opinions within the network, providing a welcome diversity of approaches to the discussion.

History of the network

The EnJust-Network was initiated in 2018 at the Geography Department of the Christian-Albrechts-University of Kiel by Silja Klepp, Florian Dünckmann and Jonas Hein. The founding members, most of whom are academics, include geographers, lawyers, philosophers and political scientists. As a first step, this group organized an international conference on environmental justice, which brought practitioners, artists and scientists from various disciplines to Kiel in June 2019. This conference, at which the website also officially went online, created a first analogue communication space. In the future, we hope for a lively exchange both online and offline.

We are very happy to welcome new members. To learn more, click here.