Voices for Just Climate Action aims to ensure that by 2025, local civil society and underrepresented groups will have taken on a central role as creators, facilitators and advocates of innovative climate solutions. Their inclusion is crucial for effective and lasting climate responses, and because the climate crisis is also a societal challenge with ethical and human rights aspects.

Why we need a climate justice approach

Climate change is essentially a human rights issue because of its devastating effect on human life – and rights. It exacerbates existing inequalities between rich and poor, ethnicities, sexes, generations and communities. It undermines democracy and threatens the economy and development at large. Likewise, by far the greatest burden falls on those already in poverty and on underrepresented groups such as Indigenous peoples, the rural and urban poor, women and youth, although they are the least responsible for climate change.

This is why we need a climate justice approach. A just climate transition reduces structural injustices in society, such as the exclusion of marginalized groups from decision-making and from sustainable sources of income. Climate justice also calls for a fair distribution of costs and climate finance. Those who cause climate change should bear the costs of a transition to economies that provide dignified, productive and ecologically sustainable livelihoods; responsive governance and ecological resilience. Furthermore, the implementation of climate action should be transparent and participatory, in accordance with the right to information.

So, just climate action explicitly addresses these power imbalances and aims to achieve gender equality and social inclusion.

How Voices for Just Climate Action works

Led from the bottom up by strong local CSOs, the program works with an inclusive and rights-based attitude to create widespread societal support for locally-shaped climate solutions. This includes building broad-based climate alliances at country level, bridging divides (urban-rural, gender, youth), and amplifying voices in new, unusual ways. In addition, it will influence national and global policies and financial flows (e.g. climate finance, private sector investments) in support of these locally-shaped solutions. The program is implemented by an alliance of six organizations, including Hivos. With a view to future sustainability, the alliance will steadily increase overall ownership of the program by local CSOs over its five-year period.

Read more about the program (PDF)

Main strategic interventions

  1. Linking and training CSOs representing many constituencies (women, youth, Indigenous people, urban poor, digital activists, citizen journalists) to collaborate on a shared climate agenda and locally-shaped solutions.
  2. Setting the agenda, shaping public debate, and creating momentum on climate action through alternative storytelling, both on and offline.
  3. Engaging in forceful joint lobby and advocacy to make climate policy, practice and finance more responsive to locally-shaped climate solutions.

Where

Brazil, Bolivia & Paraguay, Indonesia, Kenya, Tunisia and Zambia

Selection of results

  • In Indonesia, an archipelago extremely vulnerable to the impacts of climate change, we help communities become part of decision-making on local climate policies. In East Nusa Tenggara, we established a climate forum for the community to take part in discussions on climate change and climate policies. And together with women in North Jakarta we mapped out the parts of slums most vulnerable to rising sea levels to advocate for protective measures.

  • In Brazil, a vast country now hit by extreme weather events much more frequently, we’ve been working to unite eight coalitions that include 40 local organizations behind a common agenda. Megafone Activism, for example, uses activist art to amplify the voices of activists from the Amazon. Banzeiros Radios reports on violence against environmental and human rights activists in remote places in the Amazon. And InfoAmazonia involves local communities by mapping the effects of climate change on their lives and surroundings.

  • For a long time in Kenya, local communities and Indigenous people were not consulted or included in developing strategies to deal with climate change. This changed when Marsabit County launched its first community-led and centered climate change action plan in Loiyangalani, home to the El Molo community.

    PACIDA, with support from Hivos, helped develop the plan using a Participatory Climate Risk Assessment (PCRA). This approach involves close consultations with the local and Indigenous communities that make up the largest population of Marsabit.

    Based on their input, the plan identifies the areas of investment most needed to build resilience to climate change in the county. For example, in drought mitigation, climate-smart agriculture, and also peace-building initiatives to prevent ethnicbased conflicts over scarce natural resources.

    President Ruto launched the Marsabit County Climate Change Action Plan on November 23, 2023.

Period and budget

2021 – 2025, € 55 million euros

Donor

The Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs under its five-year strategic partnership: “Power of Voices”

Alliance Partners

World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) Netherlands, SouthSouthNorth, Akina Mama wa Afrika, Slum Dwellers International, Fundación Avina, Hivos.

 

To present a complaint related to the VCA program you can write to grievance@voicesforclimateaction.org or use our Hivos’ Whistleblowing and Complaints procedure. When using the email address, please indicate the reasons of your grievance, date of occurrence, proposed solution and a contact to follow up.