Centering Equity in Climate Investing: A Conversation on Climate Justice

Climate Justice focuses on the root causes of the climate crisis through an intersectional lens of racism, classism, capitalism, economic injustice, and environmental harm. Climate justice supports a Just Transition for communities and workers away from a fossil fuel economy and focuses on making the necessary systemic changes to address unequal burdens to our communities and to realign our economy with our natural systems.

Climate Justice Alliance

April 13, 2023

Thank you to our brilliant panelists Steph Speirs of Solstice, Nneka (Uzoh) Kibuule of Aligned Climate Capital and Roman Torres Boscan of the Schmidt Family Foundation, for providing your invaluable insights into the importance of centering equity in climate investing during our virtual roundtable hosted by Emma Leavy of Gratitude Railroad.

Some key take aways from the conversation ⬇️

🔹 Unlocking the capital required to for climate mitigation and resilience is going to require the full finance tool box; there is a role for debt, venture capital, grants, and tax equity. We need to break down silos between different sources of capital and think about creatively about layering different capital to mitigate the perceived risk of climate justice work.

🔹 You have a much better shot of being successful when you bring the people closest to the problem into the design process.

🔹 We don’t need to reinvent the wheel and there is an abundance of resources to leverage for this work such as the Community Investment Guarantee Pool, Community Infrastructure Center, Justice40 Accelerator, Empower Innovation, and WE ACT.