Background
The Centre for Just Places convenes and facilitates workshops within the climate justice space in order to create capacity and resilience. In 2021, CJP brought together 80 Community Service Organisations (CSOs) across local government areas in Melbourne to build climate literacy, understand how climate change is impacting organisations and communities, and identify needs, strengths and potential responses. These workshops bring into conversation those working in housing, mental health, settlement, community development, urban planning, emergency management, and other areas of climate resilience to co-create local and context specific knowledge about the intersectional aspects of social inequities, vulnerabilities and climate change. This place-based approach helps reveal the underlying drivers of risk and vulnerability, highlighting roles and responsibilities, and opens up space for shared advocacy and collaboration through a climate justice lens.
This paper proposes a place-based strategy to enhance climate adaptation and resilience in Melbourne’s disadvantaged communities through collaboration between community service organizations (CSOs) and local governments. By bringing CSOs and local governments together, this approach fosters relationship-building, learning, and collaboration, breaking down silos between health, social services, emergency management, and climate adaptation planning. We contend that this approach facilitates the creation of ‘interstitial’ spaces necessary for realising climate justice in practice, addressing both contextual and systemic vulnerabilities in specific locations.
The Centre presented this paper at the State of Australasian Cities Conference 2021. It is also available on APO via the Australasian Cities Research Network.