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Local governments around the world are formulating different ways to address climate change. However, the compounding and overlapping vulnerabilities of historically marginalized residents are commonly tackled in a fragmented manner by conventional adaptation approaches, even when justice is presented as an overarching goal of these plans. In response, we propose an intersectional pivot in climate adaptation research and practice to analyze the interconnected forms of social-environmental injustices that drive vulnerabilities in cities, paving the way for more concrete and integrated strategies of just urban adaptation and transformation. This paper brings together narrative and analytical review methodologies to inform a new conceptual framework that highlights the need to (1) tackle underlying reinforcers of racial and gender inequalities; (2) redress drivers of differential vulnerabilities; (3) take politics and ethics of care seriously; (4) adopt place-based and place-making approaches; and (5) promote cross-identity forms of activism and community resilience building. We illustrate the framework with examples of ongoing projects in Barcelona, Spain, which is an early adopter of intersectional thinking and justice-driven principles in climate action. Although many initiatives are in a pilot phase and do not all exclusively focus on climate adaptation, experiences from Barcelona do provide illustrative directionality for innovative and integrated approaches that can address multiple and intersecting social-environmental inequities.

Abstract In their own battles and strategy meetings since the early 1980s, EJOs (environmental justice organizations) and their networks have introduced several concepts to political ecology that have also been taken up by academics and policy makers. In this paper, we explain the contexts in which such notions have arisen, providing definitions of a wide array of concepts and slogans related to environmental inequities and sustainability, and explore the connections and relations between them. These concepts include: environmental justice, ecological debt, popular epidemiology, environmental racism, climate justice, environmentalism of the poor, water justice, biopiracy, food sovereignty, "green deserts", "peasant agriculture cools downs the Earth", land grabbing, Ogonization and Yasunization, resource caps, corporate accountability, ecocide, and indigenous territorial rights, among others. We examine how activists have coined these notions and built demands around them, and how academic research has in turn further applied them and supplied other related concepts, working in a mutually reinforcing way with EJOs. We argue that these processes and dynamics build an activist-led and co-produced social sustainability science, furthering both academic scholarship and activism on environmental justice