This story is part of our end-of-year campaign celebrating how the CLT Center is working to serve the global CLT movement. This week, we’re highlighting:
The Climate Justice Initiative
The climate emergency is no longer a distant threat: it’s here, reshaping where and how people live. For many low-income communities, climate impacts mean losing homes, livelihoods, and even the right to remain in place. After every flood or wildfire, land grabs and displacement follow, widening the gap between those who can recover and those who cannot.
Knowing this, we began to ask ourselves a simple question:
How can CLTs—the same organizations that secure affordable housing and collective land stewardship—also become infrastructure for climate resilience?
That very question evolved into the Climate Justice Initiative, a collective effort positioning CLTs as key players to achieve a fair, sustainable, equitable, and decarbonized future. Rather than relying on top-down climate responses, the initiative builds on decades of community-led land stewardship and affordable housing work. Across the world, CLTs are already experimenting with solutions, designing net-zero homes, restoring ecosystems, strengthening food sovereignty, and ensuring that recovery after disaster is collective and just.
Yet these local innovations often go unseen by policymakers and funders. This Initiative seeks to change that by:
- Documenting community-led climate strategies;
- Supporting peer learning exchanges and practitioner-authored case studies;
- Producing practical tools and publications—through Terra Nostra Press—on adaptation, mitigation, and equity;
- Advocating for policy frameworks that place land justice at the heart of climate action.
The collective intelligence and community power triggered by initiatives like CLTs have a great potential to face the challenges of these key decades to limit global warming while ensuring the protection of vulnerable communities. The first CLTs and Climate Justice peer-learning sessions we ran this year show that CLTs already implement a lot of interesting and innovative practices locally. To scale up, these need to be known, and to receive the right public support. It is urgent to produce evidence to support the advocacy work of national and regional CLT networks and to foster pilot initiatives everywhere.
— Pierre Arnold, Project Lead at the Climate Justice Initiative / Habitat International Coalition Board Representative for Europe
Online Peer-Learning Workshops
In May 2025, we kicked things off during “CLTs and Climate Action: A Global Dialogue for World CLT Day 2025,” a peer-led learning session bringing together practitioners from different parts of the world to explore how CLTs are responding to the climate crisis.
Following that first dialogue, the Center began hosting a monthly workshop series to keep the conversation and collaboration alive:
September
Disaster Preparation and Recovery: Peer learning on planning, response, and rebuilding together.
October
Energy Retrofit: How CLTs can decarbonize affordably while improving comfort and health
Are you a CLT practitioner interested in participating in future workshops on CLTs and Climate Justice?
Support Our Work
Through the Climate Justice Initiative, the CLT Center aims for a world where organized communities reduce their environmental impact, strengthen collective preparedness, and recover together after disasters.
Every peer exchange, every toolkit, every shared lesson strengthens the movement for climate and housing justice.