Framing processes in the climate movement: from climate change to climate justice

The climate movement has changed greatly in recent years. Since the wide-ranging umbrella group the Climate Action Network was created in 1989 “to coordinate the NGO response” (Busby 2010: 107) to the work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (the IPCC) there may be said to have been a definite current of radicalisation in the movement. With what has generally judged to be the failure of the body’s 15th conference of the parties, held in Copenhagen in 2009, the movement entered a period of earnest internal debate. Rising Tide North America published a reaction entitled ‘the climate movement is dead. Long live the climate movement’ (Rising Tide 2010); the climate camps in the UK began to question whether they had become ‘media savvy’ at the cost of diluting their message; an alternative summit was convened in the city of Cochabamba by Evo Morales in Bolivia. Debates raged over the actions that the movement should use (direct rather than symbolic), the rejection of the ‘green economy’ solution (where the current global economic system is seen as integral to the destruction of the earth’s climate), and the perceived tendency of the movement to isolate itself from the linked and pertinent issues of other movements (namely human rights and social justice, thus the move towards ideas of climate justice)