Climate & Environmental Justice — Round One

By this we mean understanding climate change and environmental harm as social justice and human rights issues. It recognises that the people and communities who have contributed least to climate change are experiencing its most severe impacts, including poor housing, heat, flooding, pollution and food insecurity, often shaped by wider inequalities such as poverty, racism, disability and migration status.

Our approach to climate and environmental justice centres the lived experience, leadership and agency of those most affected. It supports action that improves everyday life while addressing the systems and decisions that drive unequal exposure to climate and environmental harm. 

The term refers to community‑led action grounded in the lived experience of people in specific places or locations, whether a neighbourhood, borough or a clearly defined community across London. 

It responds to climate‑related harms and environmental challenges as they are experienced locally and is shaped by those most affected. Organisations must demonstrate a clear, accountable connection to local realities, lived experience and strong community relationships, even when operating across multiple locations or at a London‑wide level. 

For example, a community‑owned renewable energy initiative (such as shared solar power) rooted in specific London neighbourhoods and supporting communities facing fuel poverty. 

Social action is often the route to systems change. For example, advocacy, campaigning, and community organising (social action) can lead to policy reform or shifts in narrative (systems change). Both aim to address root causes, but systems change focuses on how systems operate, whereas social action focuses on who is affected and how to mobilise for change. Social action work may include, but is not limited to, advocacy, campaigning, community organising, evidence gathering, research, and strategic communications. 

We have taken the definitions below from Sistren Legal Collective’s ​‘Just Words’ toolkit.

• “Advocacy is the act of representing, supporting or promoting a particular cause, influencing public policy, and/​or educating voters and society about issues affecting select communities or society at large. While there are many different types of advocacy, in the context of charities, NGOs, and activists, advocacy usually means influencing government policies, laws, and public attitudes to create systemic change.”
• “Campaigning is a means for an organisation to further their purpose by organising activities to raise awareness of an issue or to call a community to action over a relevant cause. A campaign typically involves planning and organising a series of activities aimed at achieving a certain change within society. Campaigning activities can take many forms, from online social media campaigns to hosting community yoga and meditation wellbeing workshops to raise awareness of public health matters. Charities in England and Wales need to be aware of particular guidance by the Charity Commission when campaigning.”

Note to applicants on advocacy and campaigning: In this programme, we will not fund one-off campaigns that advocate for people without supporting them in acting on their own behalf (external advocacy). We will fund only campaigns that build long-term community power, leadership, and agency. 

This definition of community organising is taken from the Community Organisers’ website. 

• Community organising ​“When communities work together, the possibilities for positive change are endless. Community organising is the work of bringing people together to take action around their common concerns and overcome social injustice. Community organisers reach out and listen, connect, and motivate people to build their collective power. When people are organised, communities get heard, and power begins to shift, creating real change for good.” 

This refers to transforming how climate change is understood, discussed, and acted upon, starting from lived experience and local relevance, and influencing wider narratives. It involves changing the underlying stories and assumptions that shape public attitudes by creating spaces for communities to define what climate justice means to them. 

We are looking to fund community-led storytelling, documentation of lived experience, narrative research, and efforts to counter targeted misinformation, rather than generic media outreach. 

For example, this could involve working with creatives and campaigners to counter misinformation narratives about climate change through collective stories based on lived experience of climate injustice, or by inserting climate justice narratives into mainstream storytelling. 

Lived experience within ​‘community-led’ organisations is relevant to the community or protected characteristic the organisation serves. In this programme, lived experience refers specifically to the experiences of people and communities affected by climate and environmental harms, such as heat, poor housing, pollution, flooding, food insecurity, and lack of access to green spaces. 

This lived experience provides insight into how people experience climate and environmental challenges in everyday life. We recognise this as a form of expertise that should inform solutions, decision-making and systems change. 

Organisations will need to demonstrate how they will use flexible funding to support their core costs and long-term strategic objectives, and how their work contributes to systems change. These costs may include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Core costs, such as staff salaries, wellbeing, training, overheads, and infrastructure
• Programme activity, including frontline service provision and using insights to inform social action and systems change work
• Organisational development, such as time to reflect, learn, and adapt
• Collaboration and movement-building, including connecting with other organisations, sharing insights, and building collective power
• Community organising, advocacy and campaigning, drawing on frontline experience to influence policy and practice
• Data and storytelling to capture impact and amplify the voices of those affected 

Systems change is about transforming and shifting the structures, processes, and mental models that perpetuate inequality. Examples of mental models include:

• Assumptions that communities lack the expertise or capacity to lead solutions
• Lived experience is undervalued relative to institutional or scientific expertise, with marginalised communities expected to adapt to systems not designed for them
• Climate is treated primarily as a technical, scientific or environmental issue rather than a social justice and human rights issue, thereby separating ​‘people issues’ from ​‘planet issues’
• Fear‑based narratives, alongside political polarisation and misinformation, that alienate frontline groups

In a climate justice context, systems change means addressing the root causes of climate and environmental inequality by shifting policies, practices, power dynamics, relationships, and the underlying narratives that shape people’s lives. It goes beyond short-term fixes. It invests in the long-term capacity of communities most affected by heat, damp, mould, pollution, flooding, and lack of access to nature, to influence and transform the systems around them. 

Systems change might include: 

• Influencing policy, planning or services: Using lived experience and community evidence to inform decisions on issues such as housing conditions, heat resilience, flood planning, air quality, and local climate adaptation.
• Building community power and leadership: Supporting the communities most affected by climate and environmental harm to organise, develop leadership and influence decisions that affect their lives.
• Shifting narratives around climate-related harm and environmental challenges: Reframing how climate issues are understood by centring lived experience and everyday realities through storytelling, community media, or cultural work that challenges misinformation and highlights climate as a social justice and human rights issue.
• Developing community-led solutions that inform wider change: Designing and delivering local responses to issues such as energy, food, housing or green space, and using them to influence policy or wider practice.
• Strengthening collaboration and infrastructure: Building alliances, networks and shared learning to support collective action, reduce isolation and strengthen the broader climate justice ecosystem.

We understand systems change will look different depending on an organisation’s size, role and stage of development. We will assess this proportionately.

We expect all organisations to explain how their work contributes to longer-term, structural change, in ways appropriate to their context. This may include strengthening lived experience in leadership, gathering evidence, building community voice, or creating spaces for collective action. 

By community-led, we mean work shaped and driven by the people most affected by climate and environmental harm through community leadership, lived-experience insight, decision-making power, long-term relationships, or shared governance. We’ll prioritise organisations who can demonstrate the following:

• Decision‑making power resides within the community (they are not merely consulted), e.g. through community members in governance roles, lived experience in leadership, participatory decision‑making structures, and community ownership of assets. 
• Lived experience shapes strategy, priorities and solutions, with communities defining the problems and solutions, e.g. shifts in organisational strategy driven by community input and paid roles for community researchers, storytellers or organisers.
• Accountability is to a specific community or locality, for example, through a long-term presence in a place, location or community, and includes structures for accountability, such as community forums. We want to know, in practice, how an organisation’s work responds to the needs and lives of the people it aims to support. 

When we use the term ​‘marginalised communities’ in the context of climate and environmental justice, we refer to communities who experience structural inequalities, limited access to power, resources or opportunities, and are disproportionately affected by climate-related harm and environmental challenges. 

In London, this may include communities affected by poverty, racial inequity, disability-related barriers, insecure housing, migration-related exclusion, age-related inequality, or unequal access to healthy environments and green spaces.

We recognise that overlapping systems and identities shape experiences of marginalisation and may vary across communities and places. 

This is proof of credible experience in climate and environmental work, including evidence of trusted relationships with communities, proof of relevant delivery, and the ability to learn from and adapt to the work an organisation does. 

Intersectionality describes how social identities and systems of power intersect to shape lived experience and outcomes. Ignoring these intersections can render certain forms of injustice invisible. Working at the intersection of climate and other social justice issues means addressing climate change in ways that recognise and respond to its unequal social impacts while actively advancing fairness, equity, and human rights. 

In practice, it involves designing climate solutions that tackle structural inequalities, including poverty, racism, health disparities and housing insecurity, ensuring that climate action does not impose disproportionate burdens on those least responsible for the crisis. It is an approach that:

• Treats climate change as a social, economic, and political issue, not only an environmental one 
• Centres the experiences and leadership of the communities most affected by climate impacts and social injustice 
• Seeks outcomes that are both low‑carbon and socially just, improving lives while reducing emissions