1 Climate Action Planning: An Intersectional Approach to The Urban Equity Dilemma Chandra Russo 1 & Andrew Pattison 23 Forthcoming in the edited volume: World Turning: Race, Class, Gender, and Global Climate Change. Please do not cite without authors’ permission Introduction Findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the leading international scientific institution on climate change research, unequivocally demonstrate that, without intervention, climate change will have devastating impacts on human communities. Those who face the intersections of racism, classism and sexism have long born the brunt of environmental hazards, both globally and in the United States (Bullard 2005; Chavis and Lee 1987). This is no different when it comes to climate change which, under existing social conditions, puts the global poor, people of color, and women at the greatest risk (Nagel 2012; Douglas et al. 2012; Shearer 2011) and has been projected to be “globally stratifying, because its worst impacts will fall disproportionately on those countries, livelihood systems and ‘at risk’ populations that are already poor”(Devereux and Edwards 2004: 28). Importantly, such global stratification should not be interpreted as only impacting regions of the Global South. In U.S. cities, the intersecting systems of 1 University of California Santa Barbara, Department of Sociology 2 University of Colorado Denver, School of Public Affairs 3 We are immensely grateful for the helpful feedback on earlier versions provided by George Lipsitz and Erik Nielsen as well as the editors of World Turning.