Climate change is here. It is no longer a future prediction. We are living through its effects — with floods, droughts and unusual temperature fluctuations increasingly common. There is now a very limited window in which we can still save the planet. The stakes are high.

At the same time, there is growing global recognition of environmental rights. In July 2022, the United Nations General Assembly formally recognised that everyone has a right to a healthy environment. Africa recognised this right in the 1980s in the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights. In South Africa, the environmental right is also protected in our Constitution.

Yet communities living in poverty live next to mines, power stations, waste treatment plants and landfill sites; breathe polluted air; drink dirty water and aren’t always able to access healthcare when their environment makes them sick. Environmental injustice is all about how environmental harm impacts communities living in poverty, black people and women, more than others with relative privilege.

Apartheid spatial planning relegated black people to “homelands” where the government saw little need to protect resources like clean air and water. Women’s insecure land tenure, socially constructed gender roles in relation to domestic and care work, and reproductive health needs make them particularly vulnerable to environmental harm.

Those most affected are also often excluded from decisions about land and natural resource use. This is particularly unjust given that the drivers of environmental harm are corporate not community — corporates that are poorly regulated by the state and are often based in the global North. The inequalities are both local and global.

The environmental justice movement in South Africa is therefore located at the confluence of a series of our greatest challenges: the struggle against racism, the struggle against poverty, the struggle against patriarchy, the struggle against colonialism, and the struggle to protect the environment as the natural resource base on which all economic activity depends.

Pushing back against these inequalities and fighting to realise environmental rights and save the planet is an active and growing environmental justice movement. At the forefront of these struggles are community-based environmental activists who are our frontline defence against climate change. They are cleaning rivers, collecting waste, driving a just energy transition, monitoring air quality, preventing seismic blasting, growing food and protecting biodiversity.

Their important work is undermined when states and corporations not only fail to create conducive conditions but actively place them at risk. Environmental activists risk their lives when standing up to corporate (and state) power.

According to Global Witness, four environmental activists were killed every week in 2020. These global realities exist in South Africa too, as the assassinations of activists Bazooka Radebe (2016) and Fikile Ntshangase (2020) painfully remind us.

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But threats to environmental activists can take many forms including harassment on social media, restricted access to information, surveillance, excessive clampdown on protest, assault, attempts to discredit and tarnish reputation, damage to property when homes and offices are raided, and Strategic Litigation Against Public Participation (Slapp suits).

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Community-based environmental activists not only bear the brunt of environmental harm, but governments and large corporations often collude to exclude them from decisions about the natural resources and land on which they rely. This is a mistake. Not only does it run contrary to the prevailing human rights framework, but it also robs us all of the knowledge and energy that community-based environmental activists bring.

As the climate clock ticks, there has never been a more important time for a well-organised and properly resourced environmental justice movement. Yet community-based organisations doing environmental justice work often struggle to access the support — both financial and otherwise — that they need to facilitate and sustain the important work that they do.

Historically, donor funding has usually been directed to bigger, professionalised NGOs, with many donors either unwilling or constrained in their ability to fund community-based organisations directly.

Excitingly, this is changing. There is a growing global trend in philanthropy to focus on grassroots communities. Community-focused philanthropy foregrounds and nurtures the autonomy of communities. It responds to the call for “nothing about us without us” by facilitating community-led solutions in ways which recognise the agency and enhance the dignity of grassroots communities.

In South Africa, this is an important part of putting participatory democracy into action.

Grassroots communities have rich knowledge about natural resources and how these resources are being impacted by climate change, which makes them well-placed to lead our efforts to combat climate change. Because they are most acutely impacted by environmental harm and climate change, grassroots communities are also highly motivated to act. For communities on the frontlines, environmental activism is neither a job, nor a hobby, it’s a survival mechanism.

Given the intersections of environmental injustice with racial, gender and class-based inequality, resourcing the environmental justice movement by channelling funds to those on the frontlines is a bold and necessary way to decolonise philanthropy.

The latest adopter of this approach to philanthropy is a new intermediary grant-maker in South Africa called the Environmental Justice Fund (EJF). EJF is an activist-driven organisation which seeks to strengthen the environmental justice movement in South Africa using an inclusive and accessible grant-making model in which activists participate in deciding who gets support, and community-based organisations are accompanied in ways that go far beyond the provision of funding.

Supporting those most affected by environmental injustice to design and implement their own responses is our best chance of reversing the tide of environmental destruction and building a more sustainable and just world. OBP/DM

Lisa Chamberlain is Executive Director of the Environmental Justice Fund.