How do we move from abstract climate goals to tangible, community-informed action?
That’s the central question explored in a recent presentation by Vilas Annavarapu, Environmental Justice Fellow for the Carbon Action Alliance at the Great Plains Institute. The full recording is now available to watch.
As part of his 15-month fellowship, Vilas has worked directly with grassroots partners like the Mississippi People’s Movement (MPM), a network of churches, nonprofits, and local leaders, to identify shared priorities and build capacity for community-driven climate planning. In this presentation, he shares reflections from that work and offers practical lessons for anyone interested in aligning climate efforts with community needs.
Key Takeaways
1. Build climate strategies around existing community priorities.
Communities recognize the impacts of climate change, but they also value and benefit from education around how climate change works. Also, providing specific instances of how technologies like carbon management can be used plays a crucial role in decarbonization.
Communities are already doing the work. What’s often missing is the support to connect the dots between environmental issues and the day-to-day concerns residents face, like job opportunities and high, unaffordable energy bills. In Mississippi, climate education efforts succeeded when they acknowledged this reality and started from the ground up.
2. Capacity building must go together with engagement.
Meaningful participation requires time, money, and expertise. For many local organizations, these are scarce resources. Communities specifically lack long-term capacity building around planning and visioning because their time is taken up with short-term crises. Vilas emphasized that if we want community voices to shape projects like carbon capture or clean energy investments, we need long-term strategies to fund and support those communities in doing so.
3. Community trust is hard won and easily lost.
Years of harmful experiences with outside partners have left many communities understandably wary. For new collaborators, the task is to show up with humility, follow through on commitments, and offer transparency about the limits and scope of their work. Being genuine matters—people can tell when you’re Trust-building doesn’t happen just by showing up—it happens by staying engaged and being accountable over time. Building a future together requires collective decision-making, and this creates community support in a way that many other traditional community engagement methods do not.
4. Climate visioning is a gateway to climate action.
In Mississippi, Vilas helped convene with MPM a “Climate Learning Convening” where local organizations explored what a just transition could look like for their state. By inviting participants to think long-term about topics like industries, infrastructure, and economic needs, they were better able to identify near-term policy goals.
5. Understanding community needs is critical.
Asking questions, understanding, and consolidating community needs led to the shared understanding that climate education work was necessary and that work would inform short and long-term policy strategies.
Why it matters
The transition to a low-carbon economy will touch every part of American life, but it can only succeed if people and communities are meaningfully involved in shaping what that future looks like. This webinar recording provides a resource for anyone working on climate planning, public engagement, or equitable deployment of technologies like carbon capture, transport, storage, reuse, and removal.