EINFÜHRUNG
Introduction to Journal of Climate Resilience &
Climate Justice
Teaching Associate Professor and Associate Director, Masters of the Environment Program, University of Colorado Boulder
William Shutkin
In any given year, the Front Range city of Boulder, Colorado, can lay claim to a number of
accolades—America’s Best City, Most Livable City, Smartest City. The list goes on. But these
Tage, we must add another, less alluring, less desirable attribute. Owing to a series of epochal
fires and floods over the past decade, to say nothing of the COVID-19 pandemic, today’s
Boulder can be considered a poster city for climate risk, an epicenter of both real and imag-
ined environmental catastrophe. Ironisch, some of the world’s foremost climate scientists call
Boulder home, at institutions like the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sci-
enz (a partnership between the University of Colorado Boulder and the National Oceanic
and Atmospheric Administration, and employer of this journal’s managing editor), Die
National Center for Atmospheric Research, and the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research,
unter anderen.
Boulder’s climate experience is not unique. Similar natural disasters, whose increasing
intensity and devastation have been linked directly to a warming planet, are occurring with
greater frequency around the United States and the world. Climate migration, climate refugees,
and climate anxiety have become commonplace terminology among not only climate experts
but mainstream media outlets, some of whom, only a few years ago, were skeptical of the very
idea of human-induced climate change, let alone its deleterious impacts.
All of this is strong evidence that we’ve reached a tipping point in the climate crisis; unser
collective consciousness has finally caught up to the creeping reality, almost four decades
since then Director of NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies James Hansen first warned
die USA. Congress of the same. It appears there’s no turning back.
Congress itself has responded, finally. In 2021, for the first time, both major U.S. politisch
parties formally acknowledged that we are ill-prepared for the worsening impacts of climate
ändern, enacting the bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, H.R. 3684 (UNS. Con-
gress, 2021), with unprecedented funding for climate resilience measures such as flood protec-
tion, reducing wildfire risk, drought mitigation, and community relocation. These measures
reflect a major shift in how we approach and mitigate climate risks, from responding to disas-
ters after they occur to protecting people, neighborhoods, and facilities before the fact.
Wichtig, the bill also addresses climate justice and racial equity, allocating substantial
resources to communities of color who, owing to socioeconomic and other factors, are at once
more vulnerable to flooding and other climate risks and without the financial wherewithal to
rebuild or move to safer ground.
Der 2021 infrastructure bill and, more recently, Die 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, H.R. 5376
(UNS. Congress, 2022), which includes additional billions in climate resilience and climate justice
funding, are perhaps the most compelling signal to date that the issue of climate resilience/climate
justice is finally landing in the hearts and minds of the American public and people all over the
Keine offenen Zugänge
Tagebuch
Zitat: Shutkin, W. (2023).
Introduction to Journal of Climate
Resilience & Climate Justice. Zeitschrift
of Climate Resilience & Climate
Justice, 1, 1–2. https://doi.org/10.1162
/crcj_e_00012
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1162/crcj_e_00012
Korrespondierender Autor:
William Shutkin
williamshutkin@gmail.com
Urheberrechte ©: © 2023
Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Veröffentlicht unter Creative Commons
Namensnennung 4.0 International
(CC BY 4.0) Lizenz.
Die MIT-Presse
Von http heruntergeladen://direct.mit.edu/crcj/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/crcj_e_00012/2157226/crcj_e_00012.pdf by guest on 07 September 2023
Einführung
planet. Climate change as a scientific fact is no longer in debate. The question now is, what are
we going to do about it? As Shalini Vajjhala, a former Obama administration official and urban
resilience expert, has said, noting that climate threats have become more frequent and wide-
spread, “It’s difficult to oppose solutions to crises that your constituents are suffering through …
the constituency for climate resilience is now everybody” (Flavelle, 2021).
The Journal of Climate Resilience and Climate Justice (CRCJ) was launched in parallel with
these and other pathbreaking policy initiatives, in the United States and abroad, to support the
evolving field of climate resilience/climate justice. CRCJ is intended to be a timely new resource
to support the field’s evolution in this critical growth phase, while providing a novel educational
experience for graduate students who help edit and contribute content to CRCJ, tomorrow’s
climate leaders for whom the equity/justice part of the equation almost goes without saying.
For our inaugural issue, we’ve curated a variety of research reports, essays, and articles repre-
senting a wide range of geographic, disciplinary, and policy perspectives, in keeping with the
emerging field’s expansive, cross-cutting nature. The response to our call for papers in the summer
von 2022 was global. Our Advisory Board and Student Editorial Board culled through the submittals,
looking for content that was accessible, practical, and novel, and edited accordingly.
Fittingly, one of the articles, by my former colleague Penn Loh of Tufts University and his
coauthors, Neenah Estrella-Luna and Katherine Shor, uses the example of community-led,
mutual aid–based responses to the COVID-19 pandemic in Boston as a case study for how
low-income and people of color communities might effectively address climate resilience
challenges in the years to come. The onset of the pandemic in early 2020 is what prompted
MIT Press Director Amy Brand and me to launch CRCJ. We figured the pandemic was, like cli-
mate change, a singular global collective action challenge and that there might well be lessons
from our pandemic responses to be applied to climate resilience and climate justice chal-
Längen. Loh and his coauthors convincingly demonstrate this.
We owe a special debt of gratitude to several people for supporting CRCJ in its start-up phase.
Erste, to Amy Brand, Nick Lindsay, and Rachel Besen of MIT Press for being both collegial and
enterprising in helping develop CRCJ from inception; nächste, to James Cox of the Nell Newman
Foundation and Brooks Witter of the Dean Witter Foundation for their moral and financial sup-
port, allowing us to offer CRCJ to the globe free of charge for readers and contributors alike; Zu
Joel Hartter, Ben Webster, Myles Maland, Mary Hardwick, and my colleagues at the Masters of
the Environment program at the University of Colorado Boulder for their in-kind and financial
contributions covering CRCJ’s production costs; and finally, to my colleague, Managing Editor
Gretel Follingstad, our inaugural team of student editors, Anna Buongiorno, Clara Houghteling,
Mel Hunter, and Anna Perkins, and our outstanding Advisory Board members, Ana Baptista,
Dana Bourland, Anthony Flint, Sheila Foster, Bruce Goldstein, Janelle Knox Hayes, T. Jonathan
Lee, Nils Moe, Rushad Nanavatty, Natalie Ooi, Michael Painter, Susie Strife, and Baye Wilson,
for all their hard work in making this inaugural issue come to life.
VERWEISE
Flavelle, C. (2021, November 6). Infrastructure Bill Recognizes Climate
Change Is a Crisis. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com
/2021/08/03/climate/infrastructure-bill-climate-preparation.html
UNS. Congress.
Infrastructure Investment
and Jobs Act 117th Congress. Retrieved April 21, 2023,
(2021). H.R. 3684 –
from https://www.congress.gov/ bill/117th-congress/ house-bill
/3684.
UNS. Congress. (2022). H.R. 5376 – Inflation Reduction Act 117th
Congress. Retrieved April 21, 2023, from https://www.congress
.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-bill/3684.
Journal of Climate Resilience and Climate Justice
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