Youth activists around the world are demanding urgent climate action from elected leaders. The annual United Nations climate change negotiations, known as COPs, are key sites of global organizing and hope for a comprehensive approach to climate policy. Drawing on participant observation and in-depth interviews at COP25 in 2019, this research examines youth climate activists’ priorities, frustrations and hopes for creating just climate policy. Youth are disillusioned with the COP process and highlight a variety of ways through which the COP perpetuates colonial power structures that marginalize Indigenous peoples and others fighting for justice. This is intersectional exclusion – the character of exclusion experienced by people with multiple intersecting marginalized identities. We demonstrate that the space, policies and even the social movement organizing at COP25 are exclusive, necessitating new ways of negotiating, building relationships, and imagining climate solutions that centre Indigenous communities, and protect and return to them the lands on which they depend. As the youth climate justice movement grows, attending to Indigenous priorities will help it transform, rather than reinforce, the systems at the root of climate crisis and to challenge existing policymaking structures.

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This article provides an overview of police violence against Black people and mass incarceration that demonstrates that mass incarceration and police violence simultaneously produce and represent important forms of environmental inequality. Specifically, the article shows that in heavily policed communities, police violence is a critical aspect of the environment inseparable from the fabric of daily life. Thus, disproportionate police violence against Black people is itself an important form of environmental inequality. It further shows that police violence greatly increases Black people's exposure to other environmental harms while significantly decreasing their access to many environmental amenities. Finally, it demonstrates that biased policing and mass incarceration produce environmental inequality by disproportionately confining Black people to environmentally unjust spaces and by increasing their exposure to specific diseases that, we argue, are key features of the social and built environment. Differential morbidity and mortality from the coronavirus disease, which has hit Black communities particularly hard, are thus significant forms of environmental inequality that are strongly shaped by police violence and mass incarceration.

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