'Shelton Johnson Calls' from the Art x Climate Gallery

Released in 2023, the Fifth National Climate Assessment (NCA5) includes an Art × Climate Gallery. The gallery collection features the work of 92 artists, selected from more than 800 submissions. This oil paint picture may only be reproduced or re-used in connection with the Fifth National Climate Assessment. Any other use must be negotiated with the author.

Investments in climate change adaptation range from health to housing to transit to water infrastructure. The NCA5 Adaptation chapter describes the Justice40 Initiative. This public policy aims to do more than simply adapt to climate change; it also seeks to redress social inequality. To that end, the initiative requires that 40 percent of its adaptation focus areas happen in historically disadvantaged communities, which have been excluded from public decision making and investment in the past.

Amuri Morris painted this picture in oil paint in 2021. This is Morris’s artist’s statement:

This piece reflects Shelton Johnson’s life mission to encourage Black people to reconnect with the natural world. People of disadvantaged groups need to be invited into the space of imagining what a just world is so we can begin to craft it, ensuring positive interactions between different groups of people and their environment. As catalysts for change, we have to look towards ways to include disadvantaged groups in the conversation for planetary change and to foster positive relations between all groups of people.