By Jack Austin,
Dec. 28, 2025
In their new book Climate Justice Now, lead editors Joerg Schaefer and Rebecca Marwege take readers inside a rare kind of climate collaboration — one that bridges science, politics, and philosophy to rethink what justice means in a rapidly changing world.
The book, set for publication in March, grew out of a two-year research network linking natural scientists with scholars from the social sciences and humanities, all grappling with a shared problem: everyone talks about “climate justice,” with little consensus about what that means. The result is an ambitious, clear-eyed exploration of how rising seas, migration, and inequality intersect — and how researchers and activists can move beyond narrow disciplinary silos to find real solutions.
Schaefer is co-director of the Columbia University Earth Networks Decarbonization, Climate Resilience and Justice program. Marwege is an assistant professor of environmental politics at the American University in Paris, where she teaches climate
and environmental politics, social movements and critical theory.
The 16 chapters of the book bring together interdisciplinary contributors from fields spanning political theory, sociology, migration studies, environmental health, literature, anthropology, ocean and atmospheric science, urban studies, religion, and community planning to examine climate justice through political, social, cultural, scientific, and ethical lenses—showing how intersecting disciplines can advance equitable solutions to a planetary crisis.
“We really hope that the book models the type of interdisciplinary discussions and debate that you can have,” Marwege said. “It’s really showing these very diverse impacts and these very diverse forms we can think through climate justice, but not staying only on the abstract level, but by really going into the field. Each chapter has specific case studies that highlight what are the difficulties in climate change.”
In chapter 8, for instance, “Climate Justice in the Field: Migrant Agricultural Workers,” Columbia Professor of Environmental Health Sciences Lewis Ziska explores how climate change will impact agricultural workers.
Not only will workers be less productive on hotter days, warmer temperatures can lead to and exacerbate serious health issues. For example, increased temperatures related to climate change increases the nicotine absorption in the skin of workers, some as young as 10 years old, giving them “Green Tobacco Sickness.”
“About a million kids, that is from the ages of 10 to 18 pick tobacco globally, and the amount of nicotine that they’re exposed to is roughly about the equivalent of smoking two packs a day,” Ziska said. “It makes them very sick. And having climate then exacerbating that sickness is an example of how climate can affect tobacco workers.”
Ziska also warned of heat-related health issues and said that only three states mandate rest breaks. Wet bulb temperatures assess heat stress associated with high humidity. High wet-bulb temps of 35°C/95°F prevent sweat from evaporating, meaning the human body can’t cool down and can reach deadly levels of overheating. Increasingly, workers are facing days with high wet bulb temperatures with greater frequency.
Chapter 6 explores climate change from a sociological perspective. Utah State University Sociologist Jennifer Givens and Mufti Nadimul Quamar Ahmed, a Utah State PhD candidate in environmental sociology, pushed for more recognition that developed countries are disproportionately responsible for climate change.
Givens and Ahmed looked at the problem at a global scale, with particular attention to the lived experience of people affected by climate change and sea level rise.
“People will be impacted if we don’t address climate change, and they’ll be impacted inequitably. So the concept of climate justice draws attention to that inequity,” Givens said. “From a sociological perspective, we really see climate change as a social problem.”
The outcomes show that those who contributed the least to climate change will feel the greatest impacts of heat and weather extremes.
Ahmed conducted fieldwork in coastal areas of his native Bangladesh, where climate change has already impacted the area through more intense cyclones and storms and flooding, despite contributing far fewer greenhouse gas emissions that are causing global warming. Ahmed said to achieve climate justice, visual geographies of uneven vulnerabilities must be shared. He added cooperation and dialog between stakeholders is essential, especially with vulnerable communities and people who have suffered most.
Givens said she sees the book as a key tool for future leaders and especially graduate students, who will be working to address a myriad of climate change-related problems moving forward. She said a need for multi-disciplinary approaches, bringing in multiple voices and ways of thinking, will be essential to tackling future problems.
Alex de Sherbinin, the director of the Columbia University Climate School’s Center for Integrated Earth System Information explored the intersection of migration and climate change in chapter 7. Climate-driven migration is emerging as one of the clearest frontlines of global inequality, and de Sherbinin argues it should be understood through the lens of climate justice.
The chapter outlines three core principles shaping the issue. One is procedural justice, when people forced to move—often the poorest—have little say in relocation decisions. Another is restorative justice, recognizing the need for mitigation because the countries most responsible for emissions rarely bear the burdens of displacement. Recognitional justice demands acknowledging the dignity and rights of people uprooted by harms they did not cause.
Chapter co-author Sara Pan-Algarra, a Ph.D. student at Columbia, conducted qualitative research from 2020-2023 in La Sula Valley, Honduras showing how climate-driven disasters affected the lives and educational trajectories of adolescents. After disasters, many families struggled to pay for minimal school-related costs like transportation or supplies. Temporary relocation destabilized living conditions and contributed to teen pregnancy and early marriages, which both reduced the likelihood of young girls from returning to school.
“Exposure to a disaster and then consequent displacement really exacerbated positions of inequality that were there prior to the disaster,” Pan-Algarra said. “When the family is affected by the disaster, you lose income, and even paying a fee school supplies, transportation, all of that plays into the final decision to drop out work or stay at home.”
According to de Sherbinin, climate change also will induce mass migration to the U.S., Europe and other high-income countries from lower income countries. He said the U.S. economy has an “insatiable” demand for lower wage workers and exploits migrant workers to perform much of this work.
“Migrants, generally, especially refugees in foreign countries, are not included in decisions related to the aspects of displacement, resettlement or other things, because they are often not citizens,” de Sherbinin said. “So just by virtue of not being citizens, they do not have access to the legal processes in decision making in those countries that they find themselves.”
Raffaella Taylor-Seymour, Duke University professor of religious studies, explores how religious-thinking people are approaching climate change, in chapter 14, which she co-authored. Taylor-Seymour examined theological arguments about climate change, and human responsibilities to the environment in general.
Taylor-Seymour said she wanted to “implode” the traditional boundaries of religion by examining spiritual ways of understanding the world and questioning the Western, liberal frameworks that often shape climate justice debates.
Her research also draws on indigenous and environmental scholarship that approaches justice through a multi-species lens — a perspective informed by spirituality and rooted in the idea that rights need not be limited to humans but can extend to animals, plants, and even landscapes such as rivers, mountains, and entire ecosystems.
“From certain religious perspectives, like there is a moral obligation [to fight climate change],” Taylor-Seymour said. “Our chapter is about thinking about the kind of multiplicity of motivations that people might bring to this cause. And not to see that as a failure, but actually potentially a source of strength.”
Paul Gallay looks at “Community-Led Resilience Planning, ‘Building a Better Model for Flood Protection Planning,’” in Chapter 15.
Gallay, Director of the Resilient Coastal Communities Project at Columbia Climate School, concludes communities will be better protected from climate-related risks such as flooding and heat issues if they are involved in the planning process, offering their specific priorities.
Gallay said that, in terms of flood preparations, while wind driven storms are serious, they are not the only life-threatening event. Two people lost their lives in rain-driven flooding in New York in October, for instance.
“When it comes to how you plan and who you plan with, you need to build a true partnership between the planning agencies and the frontline communities that are at greatest risk, rather than considering community consultation, a check box exercise, and making a token effort to engage a community,” Gallay said.
In terms of climate justice, Gallay said that Latinx and Black Americans disproportionately are exposed to more pollution than they produce because they live in industrialized areas of cities. According to Gallay, investment in community leadership related to resilience planning is needed to address structural inequities.
Gallay said communities often do not have the resources to effectively engage in resilience planning by themselves. He added that the more shared control there is for planning between agencies and communities, the more communities priorities will be centered and people will be seen.
“We need to invest in community leadership and reframe resilience around the intersecting issues where restorative justice is needed—better housing, stronger infrastructure, and accessible public services,” Gallay said. “If we’re funding coastal flood protection, we should also be investing in energy-efficient housing, improved water and wastewater systems, and the social cohesion that allows communities to lead their own planning.”
While Gallay said communities are better prepared than 10 years ago against risks such as floods, there is still a great danger that population centers are unprepared for what will be an enormous challenge as flooding increases. The Army Corps of Engineers identified 44 different potential solutions to flood risk and each community will likely want to employ a different combination, according to Gallay.
Gallay said the cost of flood risk reduction in New York City is estimated at approximately $130 billion. That’s expensive, but not as expensive as flood and weather-related disasters. The total disaster losses due to Hurricane Katrina in Louisiana in 2005 are estimated at more than $200 billion, according to NOAA.
“The average community is still coming to grips with the enormity of the challenge, the fact that it’s growing and the fact that there are no easy solutions,” Gallay said.
Throughout the book, scientists employ different definitions of climate justice to approach the topic from different perspectives, according to Schaefer. By using a multi-disciplinary approach, the authors hoped to inspire meaningful action, he said.
You cannot define climate justice as in one single way,” Schaefer said. “It’s so dynamic, it changes all the time, and all you can do is getting as close as possible to a meaningful definition, [inspiring] meaningful actions.”
Marwege said that the team of collaborators sought to create a common language and to share the research from multiple fields, as a way to open up an echo chamber of dialog and make critical climate discussions accessible as a book.
Individual contributions served as a form of engagement, allowing academics to get out of their comfort zone and get an understanding of climate change on the ground, Marwege said.
“One of the most attractive aspects of the book, [is] it gets you also out of this climate gloom that we all have, this doomsday scenario,” Schaefer said. “So the book hopefully works as an inspiration of how to approach climate justice from what it is, making people aware how important it is, and giving the basic methodological approaches how to do it and how to not do it.”
Photo at top: The areas of the globe that have warmed due to global warming by 2020, with record warming in 2016 and 2020. See the NASA visualization of a warming Earth at https://science.nasa.gov/earth/explore/earth-indicators/global-temperature/ (NASA)