While the UNFCCC is the primary international instrument dealing with climate change, it has not focused on climate displacement until very recently.

Climate justice, like environmental justice more broadly, is grounded in human rights, including the rights to life, health, and cultural integrity; the right to a safe and healthy environment; the right to be free from race and sex discrimination; and the right to information, participation, and access to justice. 40

The harsh response of the European Union, Australia, and the United States to the ongoing refugee crisis has kept the issue of migration squarely on the international agenda and may foreshadow responses to climate-induced displacement.

The concept of “climate justice,” as used by grassroots environ- mental justice activists, incorporates the tenets of both environ- mental justice and just transition, recognizing that addressing the disproportionate impacts of toxic industries that workers and communities of color experience is key to avoiding further climate catastrophe

The letter emphasizes that, “We suffer from the end results of these actions but are never full participants in the decision-making which leads to them.”

This study firmly established the systematic existence of envi- ronmental racism, and followed a less widely known Government Accounting Office (GAO) study requested by Walter Fauntroy, District of Columbia Congressional Delegate, and then-chair of the Congressional Black Caucus after he witnessed the protests in Afton, North Carolina. That study, done in 1983 “revealed that three-quarters of the hazardous waste landfill sites in eight southeastern states were located in primarily poor, African American, and Latino communities (Skelton and Miller 2016).

The air will darken, the mountains will slough mud into your houses, and the lost river will gather toxics and trash.

But “individual freedom,” like all grand ideals, is perilously malleable and can serve a range of agendas.

When you use and change a landscape, then the place will respond.

The jacketed river could no longer flow out into its basin, and therefore no longer replenished the aquifer with water, the soils with nutrients, and the beaches with sand.

deally, Zu-Zu stories should help us ask how we can create livable and sustainable cities.