Report Release: Climate Justice Meets Global Health in the Time of COVID-19
Summary
This report, Climate Justice Meets Global Health in the Time of COVID-19, published by the UIC Great Cities Institute and the UIC Center for Global Health, documents a May 2020 interdisciplinary panel exploring how the COVID-19 pandemic exposed the deep interconnections between public health, environmental justice, climate change, labor, housing, and structural inequality. Bringing together scholars, organizers, environmental justice advocates, healthcare professionals, and policy experts, the report examines how environmental degradation, racial inequities, extractive economic systems, and public health vulnerabilities converged during the pandemic.
The report includes contributions from experts such as Jonathan Patz, Juliana Pino, Rachel Havrelock, Pam Tau Lee, Dallas Goldtooth, José Bravo, and Michele Roberts, who collectively argue that climate change and public health crises cannot be separated from questions of systemic racism, labor exploitation, colonialism, and environmental inequity. Topics explored include pandemic prevention, air pollution, environmental racism in frontline communities like Little Village in Chicago, worker protections, local resilience strategies, Indigenous environmental perspectives, and the urgent need for equitable and community-centered policy solutions. Throughout the report, contributors emphasize interconnectedness, collective responsibility, and transformative change, arguing that recovery from COVID-19 must involve building healthier, more just, and more sustainable social, economic, and environmental systems for the future.