Climate change affects us all, as the wildfires in Lost Angeles showed us earlier this year – but some of us feel the impacts of it more than others.
The phenomenon for this disproportionate effect has a name: environmental racism. And studies show that, due in large part to environmental policy failures and a lack of resources, people of color suffer the effects of climate change more frequently, and more severely, than white people do.
In the face of this, the Black women featured below are fighting to ensure a brighter, cleaner, healthier future for everyone. Read on to learn more about their efforts.
Vanessa Nakate
This youth activist from Uganda began her career by staging a strike outside of her nation’s parliament building – alone at first, but others soon began to join her in action. She then founded the Rise Up Movement, which seeks to give African climate change activists a platform to speak from, and organized awareness campaigns around threats to Congolian rainforests, among other regional efforts. Nakate has also taken international action by addressing world leaders at COP25 and the World Economic Forum, and through high-profile media publications.
Tamara Toles O’Laughlin
As the president and CEO of the Environmental Grantmakers Association in New York City, Toles O’Laughlin directs the giving of billions of dollars annually to various environmental causes. Her career began with positions in governmental bodies focused on energy and environment issues. She also worked as the executive director of the Maryland Environmental Health Network, and was the North American director of 350.org, a movement against fossil fuel usage. Her words on climate change have been published by the likes of Rolling Stone and The Nation.
Dorceta Taylor
Environmental racism is a particular focus of Taylor’s, as an environmental justice professor at the Yale School of the Environment. Before that, she did similar work at the University of Michigan, while publishing numerous books on the subject. Since 1989, she’s been sounding the alarm on the racial inequities in the consequences of climate change – as well as within the climate-change movement. Her work has garnered her many awards and distinctions over the years.
Sharon Lavigne
In October 2018, Lavigne launched RISE St. James, a grassroots environmental organization dedicated to preventing the expansion of petrochemical plants in and around her home in St. James Parish, a district located between New Orleans and Baton Rouge, Louisiana. The fumes from a nearby plant didn’t just fill the air there; they likely also gave Lavigne autoimmune hepatitis, a disease created when the body’s immune system attacks the liver. She told The Story Exchange that “if the industry wouldn’t exist, I wouldn’t have these problems.” Now, she’s doing her part to mitigate their harmful effects and save others from the same fate.
Rhiana Gunn-Wright
Gunn-Wright also lived the impacts of environmental racism, suffering from asthma due to her Chicago neighborhood’s proximity to pollution, which cleared up after moving away. That experience fueled a career of research on and advocacy for those most hurt by climate change. She’s best known for her work as an architect of the Green New Deal, a sweeping policy proposal that seeks to address a range of climate-change and economic issues. This Rhodes Scholar was additionally named to Time magazine’s list of the top women fighting to end climate change.
Dr. Venise Curry speaking out against industrial zoning, which she says harms the health of residents. (Credit: ValleyClimate's Youtube Channel)
Dr. Venise Curry
Dr. Curry spends a large amount of her time tracking the health impacts of emissions from The Darling Meat Processing Plant in Fresno, California, on the surrounding community – in an attempt to prove that when low-income, ethnic minority communities live next to big polluting industries, they get sick. Her mother, Mrs. Mary Curry, is also a renowned climate-change activist – and the person who inspires the younger Curry’s drive to keep pressing for better from those in power. “We have to constantly monitor our public officials to make sure they’re doing what’s right for us,” she told The Story Exchange.
(Images of Nakate, Toles O’Laughlin, Taylor and Gunn-Wright are courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. Image of Sanders is courtesy of Our Climate. Image of Lavigne is courtesy of Peter G. Forest/Forest Photography, LLC. Image of Curry is courtesy of ValleyClimate’s Youtube channel.)
Editor’s Note: This post, updated for 2025, was originally published March 1, 2022.