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The article offers information on the Socio-Legal Studies Association (SLSA) conference title "Access to environmental justice" on the role and agency of lawyers hosted by Warwick University in England, from March 31-April 2, 2016. The conference included legal education talks from Professor Gary Watt and art curator Sarah Shalgosky. It also mentions of call for interest from British universities that wish to host SLSA 2018 conference.

The article discusses the development of industrial waterfront structures, with the launch of projects like The Waterfront Justice Project and the Special Initiative for Rebuilding and Resiliency, for a resilient adaptation to climate change in New York City as of September 2015. The New York City Environmental Justice Alliance (NYC-EJA), a non-profit citywide network founded in 1991, has massive contributions in the development of the NYC waterfront policy. It launched the Waterfront Justice Project, the first citywide program on community resiliency. The main objective is to develop a framework for climate-resilient industrial waterfronts.

This paper reviews key challenges and opportunities addressed by the New York City Environmental Justice Alliance's (NYC-EJA) Waterfront Justice Project, a citywide campaign to promote climate resilience and sustainability in urban industrial waterfront communities of New York City. NYC-EJA is a non-profit membership-driven network linking grassroots organisations from low-income neighbourhoods and communities of colour in their struggle for environmental justice. The Waterfront Justice Project is documenting community vulnerability in the context of climate change impacts, sources of industrial pollution, and demographic and socio-economic trends. This campaign is enabling community-based organisations, environmental justice communities, city planners, local and state government agencies, local business-owners, and other stakeholders to work in partnership to achieve community resilience while advocating for local jobs and promoting best practices in pollution prevention. New York City's waterfront policies ease the siting and clustering of public infrastructure, water pollution control plants, waste transfer stations, energy facilities, and heavy manufacturing uses in six areas designated as Significant Maritime and Industrial Areas (SMIAs). The SMIAs are located in environmental justice communities, largely low-income communities and communities of colour, in the South Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens, and Staten Island. New York City's local waterfront land use and zoning policies create cumulative risk exposure not only to residents and workers in the host waterfront communities, but also, in the event of storm surge or sea-level rise, to neighbouring, upland communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The authors utilize organizational ecology theory to examine variations in the formation of environmentalist organizations across U.S. counties during the periods of 1990 to 1999 and 2000 to 2008 as they relate to the location and density of other civil rights and environmental groups in the areas. The authors assert that, during the 1990s, civil rights density was positively associated with environmental justice organizations, and negatively associated in the 2000s. The authors posit that the results suggest initial cooperation followed by competitiveness among civil rights and environmental organizations.

Activists are motivated by interests and values, making use only of the evidence that supports their arguments. They are not dispassionate as scientists are supposed to be. There is therefore something antithetical between science and activism. Nevertheless, environmental justice organisations (EJOs) have accumulated stocks of activist knowledge of great value to the field of ecological economics, which sometimes becomes available to academics and influences public policies. Vice versa, some concepts and methods from ecological economics are useful in practice to EJOs. In this paper, we use the knowledge built through the European Commission-funded projects Civil Society Engagement with Ecological Economics and Environmental Justice Organisations, Liabilities and Trade to understand the relations between academic theories such as ecological economics and political ecology and activist practice in EJOs. Some work by researchers in ecological economics and political ecology can be understood as activism-led science, while EJOs sometimes carry out science-led activism. A dialectic and dynamic relation drives the interactions between academics and practitioners focused on ecological distribution conflicts. An interactive process exists between knowledge production and knowledge use, in which one furthers the other thanks to the relations built over time between scholars and practitioners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Environmental justice and community food security represent parallel though largely separate movements whose linkage would help establish a new community development, environmental, and empowerment-based discourse. Environmental justice has been limited by its risk discrimination focus, even as environmental justice organizations have shifted to a broader social justice orientation, eclipsing their earlier environmental focus. Community food security advocacy, while offering a concrete example of linked agendas and constituencies, has yet to effectively outreach to environmental justice groups. Coalition building efforts, such as the Community Food Security Empowerment Act, presents that opportunity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the repercussions of judgment in Mining and Environmental Justice Community Network of South Africa and Others v Minister of Environmental Affairs and Others. It mentions that the National Environmental Management: Protected Areas Act (NEMPAA) defines a national protected areas as a special nature reserve such as the protected environment managed by a national organ of state or under the jurisdicion of the minister.