The climate crisis is a lethal driver of hunger and humanitarian disasters. Families facing poverty and discrimination pay the highest price, robbed of their lives and livelihoods as extreme weather events increase and temperatures and sea level rise. Meanwhile, rich polluting countries, wealthy corporations, and the mostly white and male super-rich refuse to take responsibility for the crisis—enriching themselves off a global economic system that puts profit and greed over the welfare of people and our planet.
Oxfam advocates for climate action to protect the human rights and livelihoods of people least equipped to deal with the climate crisis. We fight for wealthy nations like the United States to rapidly phase out fossil fuels, to help frontline communities with the fewest resources recover from catastrophic climate impacts, and to provide funding for climate action in lower-income countries. We pressure big companies including U.S. corporations to reduce pollution and to stop exploiting communities that possess natural resources. We call out “carbon billionaires” for propping up polluting industries, and we demand stronger taxation on their wealth and dirty investments.
We believe a just and feminist energy transition reduces inequality, shifting the costs of climate action onto wealthy polluters while prioritizing economic, racial, and gender justice. We champion climate solutions from communities of color, human rights defenders, and women’s rights groups that have intimate knowledge of our environment and of the devastating impacts of climate change. We work with small-scale farmers, pastoralists, and fisherfolk to restore fragile ecosystems, build new livelihoods, and adopt agricultural practices in harmony with nature. We lift up the voices and stories of Indigenous Peoples and women land defenders so that U.S. policymakers better understand the impacts of fossil fuel extraction and industrial food production on our climate and human rights.
