Conference’s focus: Climate action now

NEW ORLEANS — Both joy and frustration were in the air in New Orleans at the HBCU (historically Black colleges and universities) Climate Change Conference last week as environmental and climate advocates and researchers from around the United States pressed for urgent climate action and pollution cleanup in poor communities and communities of color.

The conference, which went through Saturday, featured top officials and key advisers in the Biden administration, environmental and climate justice advocates from around the southeastern United States, and faculty and students from the nation’s historically Black colleges and universities sharing their research.

It was the conference’s eighth convening and the first since 2019, due to the coronavirus pandemic.

Since then, people concerned with climate and environmental justice have moved into positions of power in the Biden administration, which created the first White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council and made strong pledges to clean up pollution and take climate action in disadvantaged communities. The Bezos Earth Fund and other new philanthropy efforts are channeling money to environmental and climate justice groups.

Longtime leaders Beverly Wright and Robert Bullard, who are also conference co-founders and members of the White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council, expressed excitement over the changes.

“The movement has changed,” said Wright, who is also director of the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice. “It’s resourced for the first time at a level higher than it’s ever been resourced before.”

For the first time in decades, organizations like hers have been able compensate grassroots organizations for community-based research, she said.

But they and others in attendance also expressed disappointment with the lack of progress on actual pollution cleanup, and said climate change now adds new damage in disadvantaged communities.