Environmental Justice Atlas

Environmental advocacy is on the rise worldwide, and encouraging as that fact is, keeping track of where and what environmental justice initiatives are taking place is challenging given the quantity and sometimes disconnected nature of different initiatives. Environmental Justice Atlas was founded in 2015 by Leah Temper and Joan Martinez Alier at ICTA-UAB, the Institut de Ciència i Tecnologia Ambientals in Barcelona, Spain. Environmental justice initiatives are voluntarily contributed by founders or members of the initiative, along with a description of their goal and location of operations. The result is a map with dots representing movements on every continent. Initiatives are sorted into different categories, such as those focusing on nuclear waste, deforestation, and all types of waste: their dot on the map is colour-coded and symbolized according to the category the initiative falls under. The goal is that different initiatives and concerned citizens can gain greater awareness of the advocacy taking place around them and become involved, as well as engaging concerned consumers to look into whether the source of their most commonly used products is a source of local discontent and environmental degradation. Because all information is offered voluntarily, there is no way to say for certain if the map shows every single initiative taking place worldwide, though that should not detract from the fact that this is the first known map of environmental justice initiatives worldwide.

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