B. Rosas:
I have been at Climate Generation for over a year now and have had the pleasure of meeting amazing environmental justice advocates, like Dr. Michelle Garvey, who teaches at the University of Minnesota. We first got to know each other during a campaign to shut down a harmful incinerator, the HERC, which has been polluting the Northside of Mpls for over a decade. These efforts are essential to the Twin Cities EJ movement and important to educate our students around, so they can see EJ lessons in real life and get activated.
Growing up in South Minneapolis, I did not receive much climate change education, let alone climate justice education. It’s not that my school didn’t teach anything about the climate crisis, but rather, that education remained shallow. Over a week or so, climate science was taught, but I wish the topic had extended beyond one unit in my 7th grade science class.
Even after learning about climate change and its effects on our lives and health, I still wasn’t activated to take action. It’s not that I didn’t care, but because my education was fear-based rather than solutions-based, I couldn’t see how young people could address it. Meanwhile, other challenges I saw my community facing, like housing insecurity, economic inequity, and racial injustice, seemed disconnected from climate change. This was because I was never taught climate justice.
I do believe that my teachers at the time did want to teach about Climate Change and Climate Justice, but didn’t have the resources to integrate these lessons into our daily curriculum. This is why our Climate Justice Education bill is crucial, as it will give educators guidance on how to teach climate justice and activate their students to not only care, but take action. Luckily there are already educators, of all grades, integrating Climate Justice Education into their curriculum.
As a UMN alum, I was pleasantly surprised to learn about the environmental justice course offered through the Sustainability Studies Program and taught by Michelle Garvey. I was sent the syllabus and in awe of the different topics that would be covered, along with the resources Michelle provided her students- it was the first time I actually saw a Climate Justice Curriculum in its entirety. When Michelle asked about a collaboration between her class and I, there was no hesitation in saying yes.

Michelle Garvey:
I’d been so impressed with B.’s environmental justice (EJ) advocacy work for Climate Generation in the Twin Cities long before we’d met. B. is dedicated, knowledgeable, and passionate about grassroots organizing, so I was delighted when they accepted my invitation to be our Spring 2024 SUST3017: Environmental Justice course partner. They brought firsthand experience as a frontline EJ leader, a youth and UMN alumni perspective relatable to undergrad students, and creative lessons on political change-making over the course of four months.
These are meaningful assets for our class community, because long before EJ is a scholarly pursuit, it is a social movement. This implies that in order to convey EJ truer to its values, I believe we must collaborate with frontline leaders and produce projects of benefit to the movement.
Further, in order to teach EJ effectively–creating lasting memories of connection and empowerment–experiential, place-based learning is critical. To that end, SUST3017 incorporates off-campus experiences, such as the bus tour of North Minneapolis we embarked upon with Community Members for Environmental Justice.

The centerpiece of this semester’s partnership with B. was a state bill Climate Generation helped conceive years ago: K-12 Climate Justice Education (House File 2297 and Senate File 476). I’ve tracked this bill with interest, and wondered whether a class of undergrads could both see it cross the finish line, and even help build out the climate justice (CJ) curriculum a Minnesota Department of Education taskforce would eventually develop. So I reached out to B., who was thankfully receptive!
To prepare both for political advocacy on the bill as well as to develop CJ lessons, we held in-class conversations with the current stewards of the bill–MN Rep. Larry Kraft and MN Sen. Nicole Mitchell–as well as climate literacy expert Nick Kleese, Community Engagement Director at UMN’s Center for Climate Literacy.

B. Rosas:
Michelle does a great job at taking her EJ lessons into the real world and connecting EJ to other social issues. During our partnership, her students and I covered:
- State and local EJ campaigns and how they could join each initiative. We discussed Climate Generation’s involvement with the Zero Burn Coalition to shut down the HERC, the coalition to implement the 2023 Cumulative Impacts Law, and the Twin Cities Boulevard initiative for highway removal.
- Legislative advocacy: We reviewed how a bill becomes state law, how students can locate their elected officials and potential bills of interest, and how they can advocate for or against issues of importance to them through letter-writing, Capitol rallies, and hearing testimonies.
Introduction to climate change education: To contextualize the CJ bill that embodied the focal point of our partnership, I introduced the Green Learning framework by the Center for Universal Education at Brookings. Then I facilitated feedback sessions on the CJ bill to explore what students could add to an eventual curriculum.


Michelle Garvey:
The final projects students produced are full of intelligent, creative, action-oriented, and hopeful ways to engage Minnesota’s elementary, middle, and high school students with the CJ movement. While no one in our class was an education major–so we could not be described as education experts!–we could indeed offer expertise in the history, leadership, challenges, and outcomes of climate justice. As such, our class was uniquely prepared to ideate activities true to the global CJ movement for lessons curriculum experts could eventually fine-tune to meet state standards.
We began by designing a more robust definition of CJ than the current bill utilizes:
Climate justice is:
A global movement to recognize the disproportionate impacts of climate change on those least responsible for it; resist the root causes of climate inequity; and repair the fractured relationships that perpetuate hierarchies among peoples, nations, and species; so ecosystems may be revisioned as commons—land, water, atmosphere—that support and sustain all life on Earth.
Then we developed a list of CJ learning objectives that each lesson plan would have to address:
Climate Justice Learning Objectives:
- Align one’s understanding of climate justice with the most contemporary consensuses on climate science
- Understand local-to-global case studies
- climate injustice
- climate justice
- Using an intersectional conceptual framework, appreciate both historical & contemporary drivers (i.e. systems, structures, norms) of global climate inequity
- Know the history of the climate justice movement: its vision, goals, and methods
- Critically evaluate
- measures to mitigate and adapt to climate change
- measures to deliver climate justice
- Imagine a climate just future:
- appreciate current projects and policies that deliver climate justice
- envision climate just projects and policies yet to be implemented
- Explore climate justice networks for:
- community building
- emotional & psychological support
- career building
- Know how to leverage one’s power to implement change
Students broke into pairs or small groups according to desired subject matter and grade level. They grounded their lesson plans in stories of frontline experiences. For example, Wangari Speaks Out was selected by Julius Mims, Max Pritchard, and Maddie Robinson:

From this foundation, lesson plans seemed to fall under the general categories of data analysis, creative approaches, interactive labs, and applied thinking. Below I share highlights within these categories:
DATA ANALYSIS
A Story Map was created by Will Arent and Jill Lonning to illustrate how certain historical decision-making processes result in segregation. Using Minneapolis as a case study, high school social studies students are invited to draw conclusions about how a dozen or so maps depicting data on how, e.g., redlining, tree canopy, industrial zoning, park space, or surface temperatures paint the picture of environmental and climate injustice.

CREATIVE APPROACHES
- Takyra Baugh and Shea Hildebrant facilitate a scrapbooking activity for a high school English lesson: students research a prominent CJ activist, then create the scrapbook in the first person point of view. This lesson familiarizes students with CJ history, while an accompanying lesson on reliable CJ resources builds critical thinking skills.

LABS
- Niko, Amara, and Jacob also offer a fire-burning STEM lab on the cultural and ecological import of controlled burns for Indigenous cultural continuance as well as restoration and resilience against climate change-induced wildfires.

APPLIED THINKING
- For a K-2 community health lesson, Lilly Stahr, Bijou Acers, and Pedro De Filippo Vannucci curated a list of books that address age-appropriate subtopics of climate justice. Teachers can consult the list and either adapt books to their own classroom needs, or apply a suite of accompanying activities developed by this group.

For example, Matt de la Peña’s book Last Stop on Market Street was selected to spur conversations on public transportation, access, and mobility. An optional field trip–a bus ride through town–can inspire children to reflect upon their own experiences with public transit, our need for efficient, zero-carbon mass transit, and what is revealed to them about their town as the bus transports them from place to place.
Each of these engaging activities demonstrate how broadly applicable, creative, empirically-driven, collaborative, and/or resiliency-building CJ education can be. I’m proud of this class of burgeoning “curriculum designers” for imagining ways to equip youth for our climate-changed reality with methods of understanding, analysis, community-building, and problem solving.
B. Rosas:
Although our Climate Justice Education bill did not obtain a hearing this legislative session, we will continue our efforts to get it passed in 2025. Thanks to Climate Generation partners like Michelle and her class, we are learning more about how we can improve the bill and create an impactful CJ program for K-12 students in Minnesota. We’re grateful for Michelle’s ongoing solidarity, and we are excited to keep working with her!
Michelle Garvey:
And I am excited to continue supporting your advocacy, B.! Because of you, Climate Generation, and the youth who continue to inspire the Climate Justice Education bill, Minnesota will one day have the most robust, cutting-edge climate justice curriculum in the nation.
One final thing: because my course focuses on leverage points to create social change, each project group added an “advocacy” component to their lesson plan designed to leverage the activity by bringing it to wider audiences beyond the classroom. Because we still need to advocate for the CJ Education Bill, these components are perhaps more useful than ever. So we encourage readers to either utilize, or gain inspiration from, the following ideas to leverage your power on behalf of the global climate justice movement:
- Take climate justice education into your classrooms and homes by consulting the Hennepin County Library EJ Books Guide for Elementary Children! Thanks to Lilly Stahr, Bijou Acers, and Pedro De Filippo Vannucci for developing this publicly accessible resource!

- Communicate the need for CJ education through social media outlets, as Zoe Freeby, Jackie Martinez, Will Herbek, Maria Hanson, and Isabella Crotteau demonstrate with these model Instagram posts:


- Create and disseminate zines to educate the public about various CJ topics, modeled here by Niko Ashpande, Amara Jackson, and Jacob Gontjes:


- Utilize this template, introduced to our class by B., to contact your elected official, informing them about the necessity of CJ education in our schools!


B. serves as Policy Manager for Climate Generation. They are a Minneapolis Southsider and first generation graduate of the University of Minnesota. B. has several years experience in community organizing and policy work and is excited to bring their experiences in voting rights and housing advocacy to Climate Generation’s climate justice work. They believe in investing in our young leaders to build a better future and sustain movement work and have centered the voices of young people in previous campaigns. B. is a participant in the Wilder Foundation’s Community Equity Program, a nine-month political leadership cohort-based learning journey for Black, Indigenous, and People of Color community leaders and change makers.

Dr. Michelle Garvey is an organizer and environmental and climate justice educator at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. There, she teaches with community experts on the frontlines of struggles, e.g., for zero burn, resilience hubs, community farms, just energy transition, and climate justice education.
The post Climate Justice Education, from the Capitol to the Classroom appeared first on Climate Generation.
Climate Justice Education, from the Capitol to the Classroom
Climate Change
A New Tool Could Help Track Deep-Sea Mining Activity
Countries are still debating whether to mine the seafloor for minerals, but exploratory efforts have already begun.
As demand for critical minerals surges around the world, countries are debating whether to mine the untapped deep-sea reserves of cobalt, copper and manganese, miles below the surface. But a growing body of research shows that these activities could have profound consequences for ocean ecosystems, and the industries and communities that rely on them.
Climate Change
IEA: Slow transition away from fossil fuels would cost over a million energy sector jobs
A slower shift to clean energy could leave the world with 1.3 million fewer energy sector jobs by 2035 compared with a scenario in which governments fully implement their green policies, the International Energy Agency (IEA) has found.
In its annual World Energy Employment report, the Paris-based watchdog said on Friday that the Current Policies Scenario (CPS), which it reintroduced under pressure from the Trump administration, has “more muted” employment growth than the Stated Policies Scenario.
The CPS sees oil and gas demand continuing to rise until at least 2050 – a scenario that the IEA described as “cautious” and “anchored in enacted laws and measures” and was widely criticised by clean energy experts.
A fast energy transition would spur investment in construction, creating more jobs across the sector. New roles for electricians, building insulators, solar panel and energy-efficient lightbulb installers, and transition mineral miners would more than offset job losses in coal mines, power plants and oil and gas fields, the report found.
Anabella Rosemberg, Just Transition lead at Climate Action Network International, lamented that the clean energy sector is “being undermined at a time when employment creation is of utmost priority”.
“Climate ambition and decent job creation must go hand in hand – but as the recent conversations at COP30 showed, there is a need for both the right targets and just transition strategies to make it happen,” she added.
A more ambitious Net Zero Emissions scenario, aligned with the Paris Agreement goal of limiting global warming to 1.5C, would see roughly ten million more energy jobs created than under the CPS, report author Daniel Wetzel told Climate Home News at a press conference.
Bottleneck warnings
The IEA warned that governments must act to train workers for these roles or risk facing shortages of electricians, welders, and grid specialists – a gap that could slow the energy transition and drive up wages and energy costs.
IEA head Fatih Birol highlighted a particular shortage of qualified workers in the nuclear industry, warning that the problem could worsen as the sector’s workforce continues to age. “I hear nuclear is making a comeback, but the interest in the nuclear sector for the jobs is rather weak,” he said.
Laura Cozzi, IEA’s Director of Sustainability, Technology and Outlooks, warned of a shortage of skilled workers in electricity grids. “That is one of the key ingredients why we are not seeing grids ramp up as [they] should,” she said. Over 60 governments pledged at COP29 to improve and expand their grids to enable clean electricity to flow to where it is needed.
Bert De Wel, Global Coordinator for Climate Policy at the International Trade Union Confederation, celebrated that the energy transition is creating jobs but added that they should be good jobs with decent pay, conditions and union rights. Decent work would attract skilled workers, he added.
The report found that wages in the oil and gas industry have generally risen faster over the past year than in the solar – and especially the wind – sectors. It noted that the oil and gas industry has a “historical tendency to offer highly competitive wages to attract and retain top talent”.
At the COP30 climate summit, governments agreed to set up the Belém Action Mechanism to try and make the energy transition fairer to groups such as workers in the energy industry. It will give trade unions a formal role in shaping just transition policies, for what the ITUC says is the first time.
ITUC General Secretary Luc Triangle called it a “decisive win for the union movement and working people across the world, in all sectors but especially those in transition industries.”
The post IEA: Slow transition away from fossil fuels would cost over a million energy sector jobs appeared first on Climate Home News.
IEA: Slow transition away from fossil fuels would cost over a million energy sector jobs
Climate Change
DeBriefed 5 December: Deadly Asia floods; Adaptation finance target examined; Global south IPCC scientists speak out
Welcome to Carbon Brief’s DeBriefed.
An essential guide to the week’s key developments relating to climate change.
This week
Deadly floods in Asia
MOUNTING DEVASTATION: The Associated Press reported that the death toll from catastrophic floods in south-east Asia had reached 1,500, with Indonesia, Sri Lanka and Thailand most affected and hundreds still missing. The newswire said “thousands” more face “severe” food and clean-water shortages. Heavy rains and thunderstorms are expected this weekend, it added, with “saturated soil and swollen rivers leaving communities on edge”. Earlier in the week, Bloomberg said the floods had caused “at least $20bn in losses”.
CLIMATE CHANGE LINKS: A number of outlets have investigated the links between the floods and human-caused climate change. Agence France-Presse explained that climate change was “producing more intense rain events because a warmer atmosphere holds more moisture and warmer oceans can turbocharge storms”. Meanwhile, environmental groups told the Associated Press the situation had been exacerbated by “decades of deforestation”, which had “stripped away natural defenses that once absorbed rainfall and stabilised soil”.
‘NEW NORMAL’: The Associated Press quoted Malaysian researcher Dr Jemilah Mahmood saying: “South-east Asia should brace for a likely continuation and potential worsening of extreme weather in 2026 and for many years.” Al Jazeera reported that the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies had called for “stronger legal and policy frameworks to protect people in disasters”. The organisation’s Asia-Pacific director said the floods were a “stark reminder that climate-driven disasters are becoming the new normal”, the outlet said.
Around the world
- REVOKED: The UK and Netherlands withdrew $2.2bn of financial backing from a controversial liquified natural gas (LNG) project in Mozambique, Reuters reported. The Guardian noted that TotalEnergies’ “giant” project stood accused of “fuelling the climate crisis and deadly terror attacks”.
- REVERSED: US president Donald Trump announced plans to “significantly weaken” Biden-era fuel efficiency requirements for cars, the New York Times said.
- RESTRICTED: EU leaders agreed to ban the import of Russian gas from autumn 2027, the Financial Times reported. Meanwhile, Reuters said it is “likely” the European Commission will delay announcing a plan on auto sector climate targets next week, following pressure to “weaken” a 2035 cut-off for combustion engines.
- RETRACTED: An influential Nature study that looked at the economic consequences of climate change has been withdrawn after “criticism from peers”, according to Bloomberg. [The research came second in Carbon Brief’s ranking of the climate papers most covered by the media in 2024.]
- REBUKED: The federal government of Canada faced a backlash over an oil pipeline deal struck last week with the province of Alberta. CBC News noted that First Nations chiefs voted “unanimously” to demand the withdrawal of the deal and Canada’s National Observer quoted author Naomi Klein as saying that the prime minister was “completely trashing Canada’s climate commitments”.
- RESCHEDULED: The Indonesian government has cancelled plans to close a coal plant seven years early, Bloomberg reported. Meanwhile, Bloomberg separately reported that India is mulling an “unprecedented increase” in coal-power capacity that could see plants built “until at least 2047”.
$518 billion a year
The projected coastal flood damages for the Asia-Pacific region by 2100 if current policies continue, according to a Scientific Reports study covered this week by Carbon Brief.
Latest climate research
- More than 100 “climate-sensitive rivers” worldwide are experiencing “large and severe changes in streamflow volume and timing” | Environmental Research Letters
- Africa’s forests have switched from a carbon sink into a source | Scientific Reports
- Increasing urbanisation can “substantially intensify warming”, contributing up to 0.44C of additional temperature rise per year through 2060 | Communications Earth & Environment
(For more, see Carbon Brief’s in-depth daily summaries of the top climate news stories on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.)
Captured
A new target for developed nations to triple adaptation finance by 2035, agreed at the COP30 climate summit, would not cover more than a third of developing countries’ estimated needs, Carbon Brief analysis showed. The chart above compares a straight line to meeting the adaptation finance target (blue), alongside an estimate of countries’ adaptation needs (grey), which was calculated using figures from the latest UN Environmental Programme adaptation gap report, based on countries’ UN climate plans (called “nationally determined contributions” or NDCs) and national adaptation plans (NAPs).
Spotlight
Inclusivity at the IPCC
This week, Carbon Brief speaks to an IPCC lead author researching ways to improve the experience of global south scientists taking part in producing the UN climate body’s assessments.
Hundreds of climate scientists from around the world met in Paris this week to start work on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC’s) newest set of climate reports.
The IPCC is the UN body responsible for producing the world’s most authoritative climate science reports. Hundreds of scientists from across the globe contribute to each “assessment cycle”, which sees researchers aim to condense all published climate science over several years into three “working group” reports.
The reports inform the decisions of governments – including at UN climate talks – as well as the public understanding of climate change.
The experts gathering in Paris are the most diverse group ever convened by the IPCC.
Earlier this year, Carbon Brief analysis found that – for the first time in an IPCC cycle – citizens of the global south make up 50% of authors of the three working group reports. The IPCC has celebrated this milestone, with IPCC chair Prof Jim Skea touting the seventh assessment report’s (AR7’s) “increased diversity” in August.
But some IPCC scientists have cautioned that the growing involvement of global south scientists does not translate into an inclusive process.
“What happens behind closed doors in these meeting rooms doesn’t necessarily mirror what the diversity numbers say,” Dr Shobha Maharaj, a Trinidadian climate scientist who is a coordinating lead author for working group two (WG2) of AR7, told Carbon Brief.
Global south perspective
Motivated by conversations with colleagues and her own “uncomfortable” experience working on the small-islands chapter of the sixth assessment cycle (AR6) WG2 report, Maharaj – an adjunct professor at the University of Fiji – reached out to dozens of fellow contributors to understand their experience.
The exercise, she said, revealed a “dominance of thinking and opinions from global north scientists, whereas the global south scientists – the scientists who were people of colour – were generally suppressed”.
The perspectives of scientists who took part in the survey and future recommendations for the IPCC are set out in a peer-reviewed essay – co-authored by 20 researchers – slated for publication in the journal PLOS Climate. (Maharaj also presented the findings to the IPCC in September.)
The draft version of the essay notes that global south scientists working on WG2 in AR6 said they confronted a number of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) issues, including “skewed” author selection, “unequal” power dynamics and a “lack of respect and trust”. The researchers also pointed to logistical constraints faced by global south authors, such as visa issues and limited access to journals.
The anonymous quotations from more than 30 scientists included in the essay, Maharaj said, are “clear data points” that she believes can advance a discussion about how to make academia more inclusive.
“The literature is full of the problems that people of colour or global south authors have in academia, but what you don’t find very often is quotations – especially from climate scientists,” she said. “We tend to be quite a conservative bunch.”
Road to ‘improvement’
Among the recommendations set out in the essay are for DEI training, the appointment of a “diversity and inclusion ombudsman” and for updated codes of conduct.
Marharaj said that these “tactical measures” need to occur alongside “transformative approaches” that help “address value systems, dismantle power structures [and] change the rules of participation”.
With drafting of the AR7 reports now underway, Maharaj said she is “hopeful” the new cycle can be an improvement on the last, pointing to a number of “welcome” steps from the IPCC.
This includes holding the first-ever expert meeting on DEI this autumn, new mechanisms where authors can flag concerns and the recruitment of a “science and capacity officer” to support WG2 authors.
The hope, Maharaj explained, is to enhance – not undermine – climate science.
“The idea here was to move forward and to improve the IPCC, rather than attack it,” she said. “Because we all love the science – and we really value what the IPCC brings to the world.”
Watch, read, listen
BROKEN PROMISES: Climate Home News spoke to communities in Nigeria let down by the government’s failure to clean up oil spills by foreign companies.
‘WHEN A ROAD GOES WRONG’: Inside Climate News looked at how a new road from Brazil’s western Amazon to Peru has become a “conduit for rampant deforestation and illegal gold mining”.
SHADOWY COURTS: In the Guardian, George Monbiot lamented the rise of investor-state dispute settlements, which he described as “undemocratic offshore tribunals” that are already having a “chilling effect” on countries’ climate ambitions.
Coming up
- 1-12 December: UN Environment Assembly 7, Nairobi, Kenya
- 7 December: Hong Kong legislative elections
- 11 December: Falkland Islands legislative assembly elections
Pick of the jobs
- Greenpeace International, engagement manager – climate and energy | Salary: Unknown. Location: Various
- The Energy, newsletter editor | Salary: Unknown. Location: Australia (remote)
- University of Groningen, PhD position in motivating people to contribute to societal transitions | Salary: €3,059-€3,881 per month. Location: Groningen, the Netherlands
DeBriefed is edited by Daisy Dunne. Please send any tips or feedback to debriefed@carbonbrief.org.
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The post DeBriefed 5 December: Deadly Asia floods; Adaptation finance target examined; Global south IPCC scientists speak out appeared first on Carbon Brief.
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