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Recently, the American Association of Geographers (AAG) Climate Action Task Force set forth to imagine academic knowledge production and sharing beyond the current conference model to address the ecological impacts of large-scale, conventional, in-person conferences. Building on provocations of Pulido's (2002) paper "Reflections on a White Discipline," this article seeks to ensure that racial justice is part of that imagining. There is much to be ecologically gained by moving toward smaller regional gatherings and large virtual conferences. Our task, however, is to assess the loss of mentorship, affirmation, and community found at the AAG Annual Meeting that sustains Black, Indigenous, and people of color geographers in the current climate of our discipline. We deploy the term climate for two reasons. First, climate refers to "toxic environments" of home institutions within which geographers of color often teach, research, and write (Mahtani 2014). We call on all geographers to contend with the epistemological, institutional, and individual actions needed to detoxify spaces and places of geography. Second, in pace with Pulido (2002), we argue that knowledge production on the climate crisis is enhanced when geography becomes a safer place for geographers of color. Action taken toward climate justice cannot happen without actions to achieve racial justice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The imperative of climate justice has been gaining political and discursive power in international climate negotiations. Yet scholars are just beginning to investigate how climate policies are impacting social equity in practice. This paper contributes concrete examples and a multiscalar analysis to this emerging understanding. As cities are increasingly important players in global climate governance, it examines cases from three cities in the global North that have made notable attempts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in a socially just way: Chicago, Illinois; Birmingham, England; and Vancouver, British Columbia. These cases show that there is significant potential for cities to further global climate justice through emission reductions while enhancing social justice locally. However, they also demonstrate the importance of understanding just carbon mitigation as a multiscalar phenomenon. In each of these cities, leaders’ abilities to mitigate climate change in a just way are shaped by larger processes of changing global markets, political opportunities and constraints, and inconsistent national regulatory environments. To the extent that cities continue to act as important sites of the carbon mitigation necessary to achieve global climate justice, this research highlights the necessity of creating national and global political conditions that enable the implementation of just climate mitigation in urban areas. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]