Labor Day honors the people whose work builds, maintains, transports, repairs, protects, and sustains our communities. Yet when influential institutions gather for NYC Climate Week, working people are too often discussed as populations to be managed rather than included as equal partners in deciding our climate future.
Climate Week attracts government officials, corporate leaders, investors, foundations, environmental organizations, academics, and technology innovators. Their work matters. But the people most affected by climate policies and climate disasters—blue-collar workers, renters, rural families, first responders, tradespeople, service workers, and residents of underserved neighborhoods—frequently remain outside the rooms where priorities are established and resources are allocated.
Their absence is not a minor oversight. It shapes which problems are recognized, which solutions receive funding, and whose communities receive protection.
My latest book, Who Gets to Adapt? Environmental Elites, Blue Collar Communities and the Growing Climate Divide, examines this increasingly important divide. Climate change affects everyone, but people do not have equal access to safe housing, reliable insurance, resilient infrastructure, political influence, transportation, or the money needed to relocate and recover.
Adaptation follows power.
Affluent communities can hire experts, influence planning decisions, reinforce infrastructure, absorb rising insurance costs, and move away from danger. Working-class communities are more likely to face hazardous jobs, vulnerable housing, inadequate public investment, and prolonged recovery after disaster. Too often, they are expected to bear the costs of climate policies they had little role in designing.
That is why Labor Day should become part of the climate conversation.
Working people built our communities. They should not be the last people protected as the climate changes.
NYC Climate Week should not merely showcase ambitious policies, corporate commitments, new technologies, and investment opportunities. It should ask who benefits from those solutions, who pays for them, who participates in the decisions, and who may once again be left behind.
Genuine climate leadership requires more than inviting workers to listen after the agenda has already been written. Blue-collar, working-class, rural, and frontline communities must have meaningful authority in planning, funding, implementation, and evaluation. Climate adaptation should be developed with them—not simply imposed upon them.
Who Gets to Adapt? is the concluding volume of my award-winning Climate Adaptation Trilogy. The trilogy moves from education, to adaptation, to democratic justice:
Educate. Adapt. Democratize.
The defining question of the climate era is no longer simply whether we will adapt. It is who gets to adapt.
As Labor Day approaches and NYC Climate Week prepares to command international attention, we should insist on a climate agenda that protects people across income, occupation, ZIP code, and political influence. Resilience cannot remain a privilege reserved for those with the greatest money and access.
Climate adaptation must work for working people.
Who Gets to Adapt? is available in paperback, eBook, and audiobook. Learn more about the book and the complete Climate Adaptation Trilogy at robertwcollin.com.
My wife also wrote a blog on cumulative impacts. I sent it. Will again.