How Advocacy Organisations Across Oceania Understand and Enact Climate Justice

Introduction: A Sophisticated and Diverse Landscape

This report was prepared by volunteers at the Advocacy Research Network (ARN) to provide evidence-based guidance for the 350.org Australia Climate Justice Visioning 2025 consultation. It serves as a synthesis of the climate justice landscape across Oceania, mapping out how the movement is defined, the pathways it is forging, and the critical gaps that currently exist.

An interactive platform for community members and activists to explore these findings can be found here.

Climate justice in Oceania is far from an abstract theory; it is a lived reality and a practical framework for action. This was the key finding in a review of 107 resources about climate justice produced by 86 unique organisations across Oceania.

This research reveals that the movement has moved well beyond simple initial awareness of climate justice as an idea. Now the conversation around climate justice appears to be mature, sophisticated, and deeply rooted in local contexts.

The rest of this article summarises the key highlights and findings from that report.

The Foundations of Climate Justice

The Advocacy Research Network summary report highlights a significant finding: while climate change is a global crisis, the justice framework used to address it in Oceania is unique. It draws from a specific blend of Indigenous sovereignty, labour rights, and disaster-recovery experience. This landscape is dominated by Australia (81% of resources), with Aotearoa/New Zealand (19%) and Pacific Island nations (34%) also shaping the regional agenda.

Image: Map of locations where climate justice work has been done or discussed.
Source. Screenshot taken 9/3/2026

The report identifies seven recurring themes that define climate justice in the Oceania region. Rather than a “one-size-fits-all” definition, these themes provide a diverse set of perspectives:

• Indigenous Rights and Sovereignty: This is the most prominent theme, appearing in 79% of the analyzed resources. It positions Indigenous leadership as the bedrock of climate action, arguing that colonial systems are the same ones that caused the climate crisis, and that they cannot provide the solutions.
• Disproportionate Impacts: This theme highlights that the communities hit hardest by climate disasters are often those who contributed the least to global emissions.
• Human Rights Lens: This framing treats climate change as a violation of fundamental human rights, including the right to life, housing, and cultural survival.
• Just Transition for Workers: This concept emphasises that climate action cannot come at the expense of working-class communities. It advocates for comprehensive support, retraining, and job creation in renewable energy sectors.
• Frontline Community Protection: This focuses on the immediate, tangible needs of those already living through floods, bushfires, and sea-level rise.
• Addressing Root Causes: This demands a shift away from incremental reform toward transforming the economic and political systems that perpetuate inequality.
• Procedural Justice: This centres on power-sharing. It isn’t enough to consult communities; they must have the power to make decisions.

Image: How climate justice themes differ across Australian regions. Source: Climate Justice Landscape Analysis Report.

Ten Pathways to Climate Justice

The research identified ten distinct pathway approaches that organisations use to move from climate justice visions to climate justice action. These pathways are not mutually exclusive; indeed, the most effective projects often combine several of them.

1. Community-led and participatory
   These projects reject the expert-led model, putting the power to design solutions directly in the hands of affected residents.
2. Indigenous-led solutions and sovereignty
   These emphasise self-determination. This ensures that clean energy and adaptation projects are managed by First Nations peoples on their own terms.
3. Policy reform and government action
   These pathways use existing political channels to demand legislation, regulation, and public funding for climate action.
4. Legal reform and rights-based approaches
   These use the courts to create accountability, often by establishing new legal precedents for climate responsibility.
5. Just transition for workers
   These frameworks focus on economic security and worker-led transition planning in regions dependent on coal, oil, and gas.
6. Building organisational capacity
   These focus on training frontline service organizations (like legal centres or homelessness services) to respond to climate-related risks.
7. Regional advocacy and movement building
   These efforts connect local struggles to broader, cross-regional movements, building solidarity between different sectors.
8. Knowledge integration
   These methods explicitly combine traditional Indigenous knowledge with Western climate science to produce more effective strategies.
9. Place-based adaptation
   These emphasise that national strategies are often too generic and that adaptation must be designed for specific geographic and social local realities.
10. Multi-stakeholder collaboration
    These processes bring together disparate experts such as farmers and fire-fighters to social workers and scientists, to create comprehensive recommendations.

The Implementation Gap and Opportunities for Activists

Despite the strength of these frameworks, the report identifies a significant gap: translating these frameworks into real-world action. While there are many well-articulated plans, there is limited evaluation of whether these plans result in actual justice outcomes.

For activists, this is a clear call to action: we need to build action and evaluation into our campaigns from day one.

This involves deciding what kind of actions climate justice actually involves, how people can be engaged in them, and how to measure if they are actually being effective at boosting climate justice. 

The report also identifies gaps where the movement could improve its inclusivity:

• Disability Justice
  Only 5% of resources explicitly address the unique vulnerabilities of people with disabilities.
• Worker/Union Integration
  While worker protection is prominent in government policy, it is currently underrepresented in grassroots climate discourse.
• Pacific Island Perspectives
  Despite being on the frontlines, Pacific-led work is often overshadowed by Australian-focused resources.

Navigating Productive Tensions

The report warns that the consultation process will involve working through different tensions; situations where two valid priorities pull in different directions. These are not obstacles, but rather necessary conversations that occur when bringing different groups together. 

One particularly important tension is between immediate adaptation (such as responding to today’s floods) and long-term transformation (such as overhauling our economic system). Activists should treat these not as problems to be solved, but as strategic trade-offs that require honest, open discussion.

Final Thoughts…

The climate justice movement in Oceania is clearly both ambitious and grounded. It is shaped by the lived experiences of those most affected: Indigenous communities, Pacific Island nations, workers, and people on the frontlines of floods and fires. But ambition alone is not enough.

The next phase of this movement must focus on turning strong frameworks into measurable action, closing the gaps around disability, worker engagement, and Pacific voices, and ensuring that communities don’t just have a seat at the table but help set the agenda.

The findings in this report offer a valuable foundation for that work.

Access Resources

• Climate Justice Report A: A review of community resources charting pathways to climate justice across Oceania (PDF)
• How to Turn Complex Climate Justice Theory into Real-world Change: Insights from Academic Research
• Climate Justice Resource Explorer

Explore Further

• Effective Climate Justice Conversations: Guidance and Tactical Tools
• Climate Impacts: 350 Organising Lessons from Australia, US, Pacific Islands, and UK
• First Nations and Multicultural Voices from the Climate Movement
• Learning in Movements: Bridging the Scholar-Activist Divide
• Why North-South Intersectionality Matters in Climate Justice: Perspectives of South Asian Australian Youth Climate Activists
• Climate Justice needs an Intersectional Approach: Toolkit
• Advocacy Research Network