Queers for Climate Justice

Queers for Climate Justice is a small and scrappy grassroots collective that uplifts LGBTQ+ brilliance throughout the climate justice movement and creates intentional spaces for climate justice organizing within LGBTQ+ movement convenings. 

Queers for Climate Justice uses cultural strategy to celebrate and mobilize LGBTQ+ communities, with an acute attention to the needs and narratives of multiply-marginalized and attacked trans, queer, and two spirit communities. Until very recently, LGBTQ+ communities have been largely invisible in the climate and environmental movements, despite the fact that LGBTQ+ people are part of every group already known to be disproportionately impacted by environmental harm and vulnerable to climate disasters. LGBTQ+ people are more likely to be low-income, homeless, living with chronic illness, incarcerated, institutionalized, and living in areas with higher levels of air pollution. A recent study using the US Census Household Pulse study showed that LGBT people were displaced by disasters at a rate 3-4 times higher than the non-LGBT people sampled, providing the first national-scale statistical support that LGBTQ+ communities are among the frontlines of the climate crisis. 

The environmental and climate justice movements have repeatedly shown that the frontlines of crisis are also the forefronts of change. We're here to help uplift and support queer and trans frontlines at the forefront! We see our work as part of a movement ecosystem working towards broad visions of liberation over multiple generations. 

Our Origin Story: Q4CJ began on September 8th, 2018 when we turned out over 100 LGBTQ+ people to the RISE March for Climate Jobs and Justice and built a kaleidoscopic coalition including Two-Spirit and QTPOC artists, farmers, and activists, as well as deeply-rooted LGBTQ+ institutions including the SF AIDS Foundation. The RISE is ongoing. We moved from the march into a future of actions and community-building all around the world. 

Use hashtag #Queers4ClimateJustice and join the conversation. Find us on Instagram @Queers4ClimateJustice.